


Talespinner

by DreamerInSilico



Series: Talespinner [1]
Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Adventure, Dreams, F/M, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 06:12:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 39,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/pseuds/DreamerInSilico
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah is an aspiring writer, and despite her father's disapproval resolves to pursue that goal through college after an unexpected token from Jareth appears in her room one evening. After she begins to have vivid dreams of the Underground, an eventual confrontation with its King is inevitable - and informative. Sarah learns many things about the fae realms, and even how her work can affect them for the better... but both she and Jareth are playing a perilous game, and it may be that neither fully understands the stakes. </p><p>(Inspired by Pika-la-Cynique's reverse-illustration challenge, and snowballed out of control from there!)</p><p>**This is a finished fic; it's posted in its entirety on FF.net - it's just a PITA to port over and I keep getting interrupted when doing so!**</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. As the Colors Fade

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sarah, Jareth, the Labyrinth, and its other characters are owned by the Jim Henson Company.
> 
> This story was inspired by a drawing by Pika-la-Cynique (go see her work on DeviantArt!); the very last scene in this chapter describes her picture.
> 
> The quoted lines from the Ballad of Tam Lin are from the version performed by Tricky Pixie - it's one of the more modern-friendly versions out there (and the one I know by heart).

The scrambled eggs were congealed on the plate in front of her. The first few bites had been delicious, hot and fluffy and nothing at all like the dorm cafeteria food that she hadn't quite gotten used to yet. But then the "family discussion" had started, and the eggs had been left to cool and crust over, uneaten. Karen was washing dishes at the sink, a constant clinking underscore to the stormy feud. Sarah and her father were staring daggers at one another across the breakfast table, while Toby had fled to his room upstairs.

"Sarah," her father was saying exasperatedly, and for the third or fourth time since The Talk had begun, "we understand that you're just starting to get into the swing of college, and that there are a lot of things there that really interest you. But you are not there to engage in glorified daydreaming; you are there to build the foundation for your future. " His voice grew clipped and harsh as he spoke the next words. "Mythology majors. Do. Not. Get. Jobs."

Karen spoke over the noise of the sink, cajolingly. "Honey, there have got to be drama or writing clubs on campus where you can pursue these interests of yours in your free time, but you have to think about how to be productive with your coursework. We aren't going to be paying your way forever." (Sarah thought _that_ was a bit rich, as she had received almost a full scholarship from the university – for her creative writing, no less – which meant her father and stepmother were paying only a few thousand dollars a semester to make up the difference.)

Sarah opened her mouth to say as much, but her father cut her off again. "Now, you've got a good head for numbers, and you really enjoyed that economics class you took in high school, didn't you? Why don't you put some consideration to studying something like that?"

"Dad, the econ class was like a club or extracurricular to me! You know, something I did to supplement what I really cared about. Swapping my real interests for a side hobby doesn't work; just because I liked one class doesn't mean that's what I want to do with my life." _Besides,_ she thought, _half the fun of that class was the wonderful, quirky woman who had taught it. Ms. Chandler would always somehow manage to connect the lecture topic to a story…_

"Be that as it may, one way or another, you have got to make ends' meet, and a degree in faerie tales is… it's worse than _art_!" Mr. Williams' brow was furrowed, and his knuckles white as his hands clenched to knotted fists against the pale green of the tablecloth. "And as much fun as you have with your writing, that is not going to be a living for you, either."

"The hell it –"

"Sarah, language! And stop yelling, your brother's upstairs," Karen cut in.

Sarah tried again, in a furiously exaggerated whisper. "The _heck_ it isn't. I'm GOOD at it, or have you forgotten why I got my scholarship in the first place?"

"Sweetheart, a scholarship is one thing, but the real world won't give you an A for effort and idealism. You _must_ understand that. Now, this conversation has gone on long enough, I think. You still have a week to change your classes, right?" He raised an eyebrow in prompt as Sarah stayed quiet. "Sarah…?"

She nodded, her lips pressed together and bloodless, her eyes nearly shooting sparks.

"Good. This week, you need to make a plan for more constructive studies. Talk to an academic adviser if you're not sure what classes to take. Economics sounds like it may be the best fit for your interests and abilities, but as long as you aim for something _practical_ you can choose something else. And no, psychology and English are _not_ practical. Keep the math class, of course, and you can stay in one of the others as an elective. But the rest need to be oriented toward a reasonable goal as of the end of registration. Are we clear?"

"But Dad – "

"Sarah. This topic is no longer open for debate. We've been here two hours, and Karen and I have things to do. _Are we clear?_ "

Sarah nodded again, and shoved her chair back from the table, almost shaking with anger. She left the forlorn pile of eggs on her plate and stalked out of the kitchen just before the tears collecting in her eyes could fall.

* * *

Her room in her family's house felt bare, unwelcoming; it looked like Karen had packed away all the belongings she had left behind when she moved into her freshman dorm for orientation two weeks ago, save for the clothes she had not liked enough to bring with her. Sarah wondered why in the world she had thought it would be a good idea to come back home this weekend, and lamented that her father had her university web account information to make the tiny tuition payments she still owed. College orientation and dorm life had been a shock, but not an entirely unpleasant one. Her roommate was a track athlete and so aside from the early-morning workout alarms was rarely around to intrude on Sarah's existence. Not knowing anyone there prior to orientation was at once fascinating and terrifying; Sarah had alternated drastically between being attending social events at a rapid pace to meet people, and secluding herself in her room to shut out the world. The hour-long drive home had been undertaken this weekend out of a sense of "why not," and a hope for food that hadn't been sitting under a heating lamp for Powers-knew-how-long prior to making it onto her plate.

Well, the first five minutes of brunch had been good, at least.

Sarah sighed. It seemed silly to leave so soon after arriving, but thanks to the argument, she had no desire to stay. In fact, she was pretty sure she would rather be _anywhere_ but here, so back to campus it would be.

She unplugged her laptop and slipped it back in her backpack, put on her shoes, and picked up the unopened overnight bag she had brought in anticipation of staying until Sunday evening. On the way down the hall toward the staircase, she paused at the closed door of Toby's room, hesitated, then knocked softly.

"Whoosit?" Her little brother's muffled voice came through the door.

"It's Sarah. Can I come in for a sec?"

The door opened, and Toby looked up at her with a very serious expression for a six-year-old. Noticing her bags, he asked plaintively, "you're not leaving, are you, Sarah? You just got here!"

Setting her bags aside, Sarah knelt and hugged him gently. "I know, but I think I'll get more done this weekend if I go back to school instead of staying. I also think if I don't leave I'll fight with Dad again, and that will just make me angry."

A single frown line creased Toby's high forehead. "Why were they yelling at you? Did you do something bad?"

"Well, I don't think I did. But they want me to study something different in school from what I want to study, and they think that I won't be able to be a writer like I want to be."

"That's stuuuuuuupid," he announced, dramatically. "You tell the best stories in the whole world!"

Despite herself, Sarah smiled crookedly. "Well, I'm really glad you think so, squirt. Maybe you can tell them that someday, eh? Anyway, you have fun this weekend, and I'll see you later, okay?"

Toby squeezed around her neck and nodded. "You'll come back again, won't you?"

"Of course I will. They can't stay grumpy forever." She kissed his blonde curls and stood before gathering her bags and continuing to the stairs, feeling a bit better.

Her appearance downstairs with bags packed drew raised eyebrows from her father and stepmother, and she glared, daring them to try to suggest she stay at home. Finally, Karen spoke. "A bit of a quick turnaround, you sure you don't want to stay for dinner, Sarah?"

Sarah smiled as brightly as she could manage, and answered with sugared venom. "Well, you two gave me quite the project for the next week, you know, completely re-planning my academic career in the span of a few days. I figured I might as well get started immediately – no point in me wasting my time here, is there?"

" _Sarah_ ," her father began in warning tone, but she had had quite enough, and cut him off.

"Nope, don't even start. I'm going to do what you said, but I don't have to like it, and I don't want to be here anymore this weekend. So goodbye, and I hope you're satisfied with your plans for my future."

She promptly walked out the door, threw her bags in her small Toyota, and began the boring drive back to campus. It mildly surprised her that she had managed to leave with those words. Past experiences had made her leery of angry partings, but she had not said anything she regretted, not in the least. In fact, she was still incensed, and no small bit hurt, by her father and stepmother's attitude toward her interests and the accomplishments she had already made. Her misadventure in the strange world of the Underground years before could easily have frightened her into shunning the paths of her imagination that led to the fey and unknown, yet it had done the opposite. She had become more cautious, surely, but her love of tales of other worlds and their denizens had only grown more and more intense as the years passed, and that fascination had begun to spill over into bouts of fitful, feverish creativity. She had published a single short story in her school literary magazine that first year, and was sending off portfolios of them to national contests by the spring of the next.

By the time she was starting college applications, Sarah had won several awards, and her stories had been featured in two country-wide youth publications. The next summer, she had begun a novel.

No one knew about that, yet. She was uncharacteristically self-conscious about it, at least in as early stages as it currently lay.

There had been a Spring Break trip to a small, nearby medieval faire, and a troupe of singers that entertained the passerby. Sarah had stopped to listen, and the song they'd been singing had not left her mind since.

_Janet asks, "Tam Lin, my love,_

_Why is it in these woods you hide?"_

" _The Queen of Faeries stole me hence,_

_Alas, when I was but a child."_

The ballad told the tale of Janet, whose lover was a human captive of the faeries, and how she rescued him on Halloween night, right from under the Queen's nose. Sarah had generally stayed away from the stories of child-snatching fae after her experience with a certain Goblin King, but that song had sent her wading through legends and folktales, suddenly fascinated by the themes that had emerged across cultures and centuries.

The story of Janet and Tam Lin had seemed full to bursting with possibilities for other viewpoints, other threads to the tale, and almost despite herself Sarah had begun to collect the ideas and weave them together. When they had taken enough shape that she knew no short story would be able to hold the whole tapestry, she'd resolved to finish it as a novel and try to get it picked up by a publisher.

And now here she was, on the road back to school with firm orders to get her head out of the clouds and into something her father's altogether-too-traditional mind considered "practical." Sarah wanted to scream.

* * *

Months passed, and Sarah soldiered ahead with her altered schedule, utterly miserable.

She tried to do as Karen had suggested, to treat her writing as a hobby to fill her spare time. It had certainly worked in high school, and for the first couple of weeks she had been optimistic that she could still make progress on her novel in addition to the "practical" regime her father was imposing.

Within a month, however, she had come to the rude realization that her ability to coast through classwork did not quite translate to university courses. She wasn't having _difficulty_ , per se, but the papers and problem sets and projects were a full-time job, and one she resented constantly because the material had long since gone beyond her interest in the subject. Her one writing class that she had meant to use as a haven became its own tangled knot of problems as her ability to relax and focus on her creative instincts dwindled, leaving Sarah more and more frustrated even in the time that she set aside to write.

Worst of all, her dreams had changed.

Sarah had always had vivid, nearly crystal-clear dreams, and they had only intensified after her journey through the Labyrinth. They were the source of many of her ideas for stories, and they served as an escape from a world that never seemed quite as colorful as it should be. The dreams had begun to dim the weekend she had fought with her father and stepmother; now, they were muted and muddled, and the subject matter completely mundane. Not once in high school had Sarah dreamed of classes or homework, but that had become the norm, as if her father's ruling was determined to invade every facet of her life.

Visits home were infrequent and tense. The first weekend Sarah had visited after she changed her courses, she had been prepared to let the subject of her dissatisfaction lie, and to try to enjoy the time with her family. Her father, however, insisted on talking about her new classes, and was almost comically disappointed when Sarah responded flatly and tried to change the subject. (Or it would have been comical, had it not made her so angry.) Every time she visited, the situation was similar, and the unpleasantness of it quickly overrode even Sarah's longing for real food and desire to see her brother.

When Thanksgiving break rolled around, along with a pointed reminder that she had not called or visited in an entire month, Sarah resignedly returned. Her father and Karen mercifully set aside the talk of school for the holiday, though nothing pleasant filled the silent void of conversation, either. Toby's excitement to see her was her consolation – Sarah spent many hours reading to him, and playing energetic games of Knights-Tourney with cardboard lances.

The night before her return to school, however, he asked her for a story.

Sarah fished around in her brain for one of her short stories to tell him, but after several attempts that were met with "Saaaarah! I know that one already!" she was at a loss. She hadn't written anything new that she considered remotely worthwhile all semester, and the realization nearly brought her to tears.

_She's come to the roses growing wild;_

_She's pulled a single one…_

The lines of the tale drifted through her memory, like a whiff of perfume left in a room long after the wearer has exited. Her novel was stalled, barely touched in months, but she could still give him the traditional version of Tam Lin. And so Sarah half-spoke, half-sung her favorite incarnation of the old ballad, which had cemented itself in her memory over dozens of read-throughs the previous summer. She had to answer a lot of questions about the words –though the version she gave Toby was a fairly young one, it still had its share of archaic language – but he listened raptly otherwise.

"Is that one of yours, Sarah?" He asked when she had finished.

"No, not that one. That's an old, old story that has been retold for hundreds of years. I was… writing my own version of it, last summer, but I've stopped and I don't think I'll be able to get going on it again…" Sarah's voice trailed off, sadly.

Toby's face lit up when she mentioned her writing, and just as quickly drew into a serious frown at the last part of her statement. "Why not?"

"Well, squirt, I don't have much time these days. And when I do have time to write, it just… doesn't want to work. I think I cram so many other things in my head that don't matter to me, they shove all the stories out."

"But that's horrible! I want to hear more about the faerie queen – don't let the stories get pushed out!" Toby was looking almost as upset in his six-year-old way as Sarah felt.

She answered quietly. "I- I'm trying. Maybe they'll come back to me, if I just get used to things."

The solution was perfectly obvious to Toby, and he made that clear. "Well, try harder!"

* * *

The following week of classes was a grueling one, but on Friday night, Sarah found herself with a few waking hours to spare, and she did try harder.

To absolutely no avail.

Words meant to paint a scene of an enchanted forest under liquid moonlight fell like soot-covered bricks on the page, clunky and depressing. Every line of dialogue Sarah wrote seemed to come out as a string of tired clichés, and every inadequate descriptive sentence was a battle to construct. After three hours, she gave up and went to bed without even bothering to take down her hair or undress.

Twice more over the following week, Sarah tried again to work on her novel. Both sessions were spectacular failures, and left her even more drained and frustrated than the mild, work-induced sleep deprivation had done. The Friday morning seven days after her first attempt (and a night of fitful sleep after her third), when Sarah's alarm clock woke her from a long, involved mathematical analysis of supply and demand in newly-industrialized nations, she simply burst into tears.

Some detached part of her mind observed that it was terribly silly to cry over a dream as innocuous as that, but to the rest of Sarah, this was insult added to injury.

She managed to compose herself enough to dress and drag herself through the day's classes, but her mind was trapped in turmoil even as she absently took notes.

_Would it be better, easier, to just give it up entirely? Stop this thought of writing and actually accept the path I'm on now?_ She was sick of fighting, sick of caring, sick of reaching for inspiration that seemed to have completely abandoned her. Something had to give, and she was afraid to answer the question of what that would be.

After her final class, Sarah left the building and just kept walking. She paced the sidewalks between the academic buildings, wandered distractedly past the sports fields, and wove between the dorms. An hour or more passed in this way, before tired feet (clad in shoes fit for walking to class, but not an extended hike all over campus) and a stiff back from carrying her knapsack finally brought her back to her own door.

Somewhere over the course of the trek, she had decided to shelve the novel, probably for good, and the choice made her sick inside, but she did not see a better option. It would hurt less if she stopped trying than it did to attempt to wring the words out of herself when there were plainly none to be had.

Sarah shuffled in, noting absently that her roommate was out for an away competition, and tossing her load of books to the floor with a relieved sigh. She picked her way over a few other piles of textbooks, and around the paper screen that sectioned off her "bedroom" part of the large, one-room dorm –

– and stopped short, heart suddenly pounding in a way that the mild exercise had not evoked, staring at her dresser.

Her reflection in the small mirror above it registered her shock, as well as her disheveled exhaustion.

Just in front of the mirror, perfectly centered on the top of the dresser, lay a flawless, spherical crystal the size of a pool ball, and a single snowy owl feather.


	2. But if You Turn it This Way...

Sarah stood stock-still for several long minutes, looking for all the world like a very dumbfounded wax sculpture (and her blanched pallor did nothing but add to the resemblance).

It had been years since the last time she had seen Hoggle or any of her other friends from the Labyrinth; her family had moved to a new house when she was midway through high school, and much to her dismay, her new bedroom was adjacent to her parents'. The visits had become rare through lack of privacy, and then tapered off altogether as Sarah adjusted to living without being able to call them whenever she pleased. Jareth, himself, had never made another appearance, though for a long time she had kept a careful (half-hopeful, but she seldom admitted that to herself) eye out for suspicious barn owls.

Now, her thoughts tumbled against one another as she cycled rapidly through reactions to what lay in front of her – " _That's it, now I've cracked_ ," was the first out of the gate and recurred roughly every other iteration; " _someone here found out and is messing with my head"_ was quickly discarded, as Sarah had hardly had time to bond with anyone at college past superficial acquaintance and the convenience of homework groups, much less grow to trust someone enough to reveal her personal faerie tale. " _The Fieries riding Ludo and playing 'pass-the-metatarsal' with their extremities pulled out one of the King's tailfeathers and stole a crystal and left them here so he'd think I'd put them up to it"_ presented an amusing mental image, but seemed profoundly unlikely, which left…

…He _left them. Here. For me._

Which, naturally, was followed by a much more perplexing question:

_WHY?_

Sarah's hands hurt, and she realized she had clenched them so tightly that her short nails were nearly breaking the skin of her palms. Slowly, carefully, she took in a deep, uneven breath and forced herself to relax her death-grip on nothing in particular. Flexing fingers that tingled with returning blood, she finally managed to uproot her feet, and approached the dresser with the acute focus of one who expects something to awaken from dormancy and attack her at any moment.

_Maybe it means he – NO._ Sarah shook her head vigorously and let out a hiss of breath at the thought that had just weaseled its way past her sense of self-preservation. _You didn't exactly give him any reasons to think fondly of you, dimwit,_ she reminded herself savagely as she tried to quash the tiny thread of excitement that was knotted through her fear.

From across the room, the two items had looked almost innocuous, assuming the viewer was unaware of their otherworldly origin. Sarah didn't keep quite as many fantasy-themed gewgaws in her room at college as she had in high school, of course, but she still had enough eclectic decorations that the crystal and feather had not seemed terribly out of place. Now, standing directly over them, the view was decidedly different.

Up close, both had a quality to them that set them apart from any of the other objects in the room. Sarah's mind termed it "brightness," because while neither emitted light, both seemed almost that they _should_ be doing so. Their outlines were preternaturally sharp, and next to them the room's mundane furnishings all looked as if they were seen through a thin screen of smoke – just a hair hazy, less _present_ than the fae accoutrements. The feather, which Sarah guessed had been taken from a soft underwing, was pale, wild, and slightly curled, recalling with perfect clarity the memory of down-soft, bright hair. (The face that went along with that memory had a faintly mocking air, but did not seem, in Sarah's much-older mind's eye, nearly so sinister as perhaps it should have.) The crystal…

Sarah rubbed her eyes. The crystal somehow looked equally and simultaneously like an orb of solid glass and a delicate soap bubble; she could not begin to guess at its weight. She reached down to pick it up automatically, but snatched her hand back before it could touch, as her brain realized what she was doing.

Pursing her lips, Sarah considered. Just holding the crystal could very well carry consequences, and she didn't…

… _Ahh, hell. It would be difficult for him to make this week any worse, at least,_ she thought ruefully as her hand moved again.

The sphere was cool in her palm, and her skin tingled slightly where she touched it, a sensation that reminded her of a menthol-scented shampoo that she had once tried. Its surface had a sort of elusive iridescence that seemed to pay no attention to how the light was hitting it, one moment completely transparent and faintly shimmering the next. Sarah rolled it around in her hand experimentally, idly pondering whether it would "show her dreams," as the Goblin King had told her at their first meeting.

_Well, if that's what it's supposed to do, I hope it shows me my older dreams,_ she thought, wryly. _The ones I've been having lately certainly aren't worth remembering._

"What do you do, I wonder?" she murmured aloud, half-expecting, and somewhat dreading, that she would hear a low, knives-on-velvet voice answering with some smug quip.

But the Goblin King didn't answer, and neither did the crystal – though it did almost fall to the ground as she absently tried to roll it over the backs of her fingers. Sarah cringed inwardly as she fumbled it back into a firm grasp, not quite believing what she had been doing.

After a few moments of silence, Sarah put the crystal back on her dresser, and ever-so-carefully picked up the feather. She reflected, as she brushed a finger along its cloud-soft length, that its presence fundamentally affected the feel of the… parcel.

… _gift_ , her brain corrected itself. The crystal alone would still have had to come from him, but he could have easily sent one of his subjects to leave it for her, or just caused it to appear on her dresser, for all she knew. Somehow she couldn't picture the feather getting there in anyone's hands – or wing – but his own, however. By all appearances the Goblin King had come, in person, to her room, and left a gift for her. And she still had no idea what to make of it.

Another hour passed Sarah by, as she sat perched on her desk chair, toying with the feather. It felt just like his hair had looked, which observation spawned a dozen somewhat uncomfortable thoughts, but mostly, Sarah simply remembered the Labyrinth. Even through the rash anger, indignation, and fear that had characterized that adventure, part of her mind had stayed aware of just what an adventure it was. Upon reflection, she was fairly certain that a large chunk of that anger had been born of guilt about viewing it as an adventure at all – she had been horrified that even with Toby at stake, she was able to play the fantasy heroine. Still, that hadn't stopped her from noticing – and half reveling in – the strange, upside-down wonder of the place.

She thought for a long time on what it would be like to return to the Underground, and what a luxury it would be to appreciate it without the urgent matter of a baby brother to rescue.

Finally, driven by the loud and increasingly insistent complaints of her empty stomach, Sarah rose to seek out dinner. She hesitated on what to do with the feather and crystal, and settled for placing the latter under her pillow and carefully ensconcing the former in her small, lacquered jewelry box. Pondering their significance was an activity that could be continued over dinner.

…..

Sarah returned to her room some hours later, having eaten and slowly, distractedly worked her way through a chunk of homework. Marie, her roommate, was reading in bright orange pajamas on top of her lofted bed, and greeted Sarah quietly before going back to the textbook in her lap.

The aloofness was just fine with Sarah, who was both tired and a touch apprehensive as she contemplated bed. All through the evening, it had felt as if the crystal was waiting for her. Her lack of knowledge of what, if anything, it was supposed to _do_ loaned the damnably beautiful object more significance and anthropomorphism than it probably merited. What if it had some kind of time-based trigger for a magical effect? Or worse, could tell when she was asleep?

_And then what?_ She asked herself wryly. _Get up and open the door to let the Goblin King in? - Oh wait, he can just poof in whenever he wants, already! Should be nothing to worry about, then!_

That thought led to the somewhat more uncomfortable image of him using the crystal as a conduit of some sort to spy on her, which seemed likelier. Still, she reasoned, if he just felt like being a Peeping Tom, there had to be at least a dozen more subtle and effective ways to go about it than leaving an oversized glass eye for her to find.

In an almost perverse leap of faith, she finally decided that she would sleep with the crystal near (not under – it was far too large) her pillow, having no better ideas about its purpose. It seemed like a risk, symbolically; Sarah could name half a dozen stories where a protagonist fell under the sway of an enchantment because he or she held onto a magical item too closely, but given how unhappy she had been all semester, she was willing to take that risk for a chance at some comfort.

… _comfort? Really? More like another adventure, or maybe some decent dreams – comfort is NOT something to be associating with His Glittery Majesty!_ Sarah's internal debate squad had been having a field day this evening.

Chuckling softly to herself, she changed into flannel pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt and crawled into bed. As she drifted into sleep, the crystal was nestled lightly in her palm.

…

The darkly sodden limbs of ancient trees twisted into a complex macramé above Sarah, such that only the barest glimpses of twilight sky were visible. A few, flame-colored leaves drifted down from the canopy, sparks against the humid gloom that permeated the air between branches and path, but far more could be seen paving the forest floor. The smell was the next thing Sarah noticed, as the autumn-and-rainshowers bouquet of wet leaves, soil, and a faint hint of ozone regaled her nostrils. She guessed that the rain had brought down most of the bright leaves at once, and only recently abated by the cool moisture in the air.

The only sound beyond Sarah's own soft footfalls was the faint, chirruping drip of water as the trees slowly shed it, and an occasional breezy rustle as a breath of wind moved through the upper branches. Once, she thought she heard the quiet hoot of an owl somewhere nearby, but when she stopped to look for it, no birds of any sort were in evidence.

The path that Sarah traveled was an easy one, for the dense, old-growth canopy left little light to nurture underbrush obstructions, though the trees themselves seemed to form walls flanking the path, and the jewel-toned corridor was wide, and straight as far as she could see. For a time, she walked contentedly – her destination was near, though when she paused to try to remember where, exactly, that destination was, she could not. (It didn't seem terribly important that she remember, though; she was sure she would recall when it mattered.)

After what could have been several minutes or hours, however, with the forgotten destination still "near" but not any closer than it had been, Sarah grew concerned. Her footsteps quickened, kicking back small sprays of leaves in her wake, from time to time, when she encountered a dry patch – yet still, the path was just as straight, and just as long in the distance.

A memory came to her, and her lips twisted into a slight smile.

" _What do they mean, 'Labyrinth?' There aren't any turns, or corners, or anything. This just goes on and on."_

" _Things aren't always what they seem, so you can't take anything for granted…"_

Sarah stopped in the middle of the path, turned, and walked directly into the wall of trees to her right.

For a moment, branches caught in her hair and pulled at her clothing, and she wondered at the wisdom of following the little worm's advice here, in this place – then the wall seemed to melt away, suddenly, and she was free. The dense barrier of trunks and limbs was directly behind her, and she could not see anything to suggest the presence of a path beyond them.

Down a hill and in front of her, twisting lazily through the last rays of autumn daylight, the Labyrinth was a strange-yet-familiar sprawl of walls and doorways.

Sarah's breath caught in her throat as she looked down toward the maze, her immediate reaction markedly different than it had been upon her first sight of it years previously. Gone was the bleak, sun-scoured monument to hopeless quests, and in its place, an impossibly intricate landscape promised adventure and fey secrets. High stone walls merged almost seamlessly into natural rock faces in one area, and crumbled in another, replaced by a palisade of enormous trees much like those in the forest Sarah had just left. (Their leaves also placed the season at high autumn, despite Sarah's vague memory of it being nearly winter Above.) Still elsewhere, the wildness of the trees gave way to manicured hedges laced with the vines of strange flowers in every hue Sarah could think of, strung like necklaces across the greenery. In the distance, the great castle rose craggily above an uneven topography of small roofs, its towers swathed in ribbons of mist.

"I wonder, is this how it was… before? Or did it really change so much?" Sarah whispered the question, almost hoping that he was there to answer, just outside her current field of vision.

But no answer came, and Sarah began to walk slowly down the hillside toward the outer wall of the Labyrinth.

As it had been on her first visit to the Underground, the wall appeared to be seamless as far as senses could stretch. Sarah remembered the handicaps – and powers – of assumption in this place, however, and stood before the wall, unconcerned.

" _Not if you ask the right questions…"_

Closing her eyes, she spoke clearly, "How do I get into the Labyrinth?"

When she opened them, a wrought brass gate had appeared amidst the stone. Sarah took a deep breath as she lifted the filigreed latch; the gate itself swung open on silent hinges at the merest hint of a tug.

She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then stepped inside.

…

The insistent chirping of her "nature sounds" alarm clock (she'd always thought the thing was morbidly reminiscent of a dying duck, which, while part of nature, was probably not what the designer had intended) brought Sarah to slow awareness of the bedclothes around her, and of the chilly sunlight filtering through the one foggy window.

Sarah sat up slowly and reached to turn off the irritating alarm, feeling disoriented, but surprisingly well-rested given how poorly she had been sleeping in the last few months. She swung her legs over the side of the lofted bed, preparing to clamber down, and only then noticed that her left hand was gripping something glassily smooth and cool.

Looking down at the crystal, Sarah frowned in confusion for a moment before her eyes grew wide, as the memories of the night that had just passed returned in a deluge.

She was still sitting on her bed ten minutes later when she heard the room's door opening; the mirror showed a glimpse of Marie entering, her hair wrapped in a towel.

"Sarah?" She called, sounding far too awake for the time of morning. Then again, it wasn't terribly early for Marie, given that she had already been up more than an hour for her team's morning workout. "You awake?"

Sarah let herself slide off the bed, landing a bit unsteadily on the cold floor. "Yeah, I am. Thanks for checking."

"Well, I heard your alarm from the bathroom a while ago and wanted to make sure," came the cheerful reply.

"I'm surprised I woke up," Sarah said as she slipped on a pair of obnoxiously purple flip flops and collected her shower basket. "Seemed like I had to get back here from another country, this morning," she added quietly, smiling slightly to herself in relaxed amusement that felt like liquid sunlight.

Marie laughed as she wrestled her damp hair into a ponytail. "You need to get up with me sometime. A run first thing will wake you up like nothing else in the world."

Sarah snorted. "Right, and have me keeling over by nine in the evening too, I'm sure."

"Why the alarm, anyway? I'd figured you were out until at least eleven today."

"Project meeting – the loonies I'm working with are just like you, wasting perfectly good Saturday mornings _awake_ …" She laughed and headed out of the room as Marie made a face in her direction. Economics 201 project nonwithstanding, Sarah was feeling increasingly buoyant. Instead of gradually losing its details in her mind, the dream stayed with her as her old ones always had, bright and alive and immersive as a treasured memory. She wondered if this was what the Goblin King had meant of the first crystal he had offered her, years before, when he told her it would show her her dreams.

Later that afternoon, Sarah carried her laptop into one of the musty, forgotten corners of the library stacks. She took a deep breath of page-and-binding-glue-scented air, and began to write.


	3. It Will Show You Your Dreams (Part 1)

The office-lined hallway was chilly and quiet at this hour of the evening. Sarah had been surprised when Dr. Casas had suggested a meeting so late – most of the other professors she knew went home by five or six. Now, at nearly eight, all the offices on the hallway were closed and their windows dark, except one near the end of the row whose cracked door spilled a welcoming, buttery light across the smooth stone floor.

Sarah reached the open office, confirming with a slightly nervous glance at the burnished brass nameplate that this was the correct one before knocking softly on the aged wood paneling.

"Come on in!" Her creative writing professor's cheerful, lilting voice came from inside.

Dr. Casas's office was as warm and pleasant as its occupant, with paintings on the walls and a soft yellow desk lamp favored over the harsh, fluorescent fixtures that were ubiquitous in the university's rooms. Miranda Casas herself was seated comfortably in an upholstered leather chair, and nearly surrounded by her expansive desk, almost none of which was visible under the stacks of papers and books that paved it. Her liquidly black eyes sparkled as she smiled at Sarah.

"Have a seat, Sarah, please. How was your winter break?"

Sarah smiled in return, and took a seat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk. "It was great, actually. Very productive." She had spent almost the entirety of the holidays writing furiously, as if to make up for the stagnancy of the last semester. The pages had flowed like water, and showed no signs of slowing except as strictly necessary for school – a fact that had Sarah almost euphoric. She had also done a great deal of thinking, which had slowly crystallized into a firm resolve that prompted her to email her favorite professor and request this meeting on the first day back at school.

Dr. Casas laughed, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "Now that's not something I hear students say very often about a break between semesters. What were you working on?"

"I started writing what I hope will be a novel last summer. It… I'm a lot happier with it than anything I turned in for your class last semester." A faint blush bloomed on Sarah's cheeks. She hadn't turned in anything terrible for the class, but she certainly didn't think any of it had been particularly _good_ , either.

Dr. Casas was regarding her intently, simply waiting for Sarah to continue. Embarrassed, she explained further. "I guess I was having a lot of trouble adjusting to school these last few months, because I couldn't seem to make any progress on my novel, and every time I wrote something for class, it felt like I was trying to squeeze toothpaste out of an almost-empty tube. But right before the break, my brain started working again, and I worked on the novel all through the holidays."

"Your work for my class was perfectly fine, and better than most, in fact. Please don't let yourself think that it wasn't worthwhile – judging from the assignments it looked like at the very least your use of language became a lot more sophisticated over the semester, even if you felt uninspired. That said, I'd love to have a look at this novel of yours, if that's what you wanted to talk about," her professor said, warmly. Sarah smiled a bit in spite of herself, grateful.

"I'd love your thoughts on it, definitely," she replied. "That's… actually not quite what I'm here for right now, though. I was hoping you could give me some advice about classes, and part-time work on campus."

"Oh? I think I can help you quite a bit with the latter, but I don't know much about the Economics department requirements. Maybe one of your other professors would be a better choice for that."

Sarah laughed, now relaxed. "That's alright, because I want to get out of that department." It was the first time she had voiced the decision that she had made on New Year's Eve. "You probably didn't know, but I was a Mythology major when I started. My dad didn't think that was very useful, so he made me change most of my classes, and yours was the only one I kept that I really wanted to take."

Dr. Casas considered this for a moment before the corner of her mouth quirked upward. "Ahh, I think I understand. You are looking for a job so that your parents will no longer control the purse-strings, and you can study what you like, yes?"

Sarah nodded, surprised that she hadn't had to use her anxiously-prepared and lengthy explanation for the decision. "Yes, that's it, exactly. I don't need to make a lot of money – my scholarships cover most of my expenses already, so I figured it would be doable."

"It is a pretty drastic step to potentially cut yourself off from your parents like that, Sarah," the professor said. "I…" She pursed her lips, considering her next words. "I definitely do not think you should be stuck in a major you don't like for their sake, but have you tried talking the issue out with them, already?"

"They cut off the conversation when I objected the first time, and after that, my dad was angry with me for not trying to be enthusiastic about the new classes. I'm sure this is what I want to do."

The professor nodded slowly. "Well, then allow me to say two things: First, it is definitely doable, though scheduling work hours with school may be a headache at times." She paused, and Sarah nodded in acknowledgment. She didn't expect it to be easy, but the prospect of juggling work and school was infinitely preferable to continuing in a major she didn't enjoy. "Secondly," Dr. Casas continued, "…good for you. You seemed like the most enthusiastic student in the class when the semester began, but then almost immediately that changed. It is obvious to me you were not happy with what you were doing, and I will be delighted to help you correct that."

"Thank you so, so much, Dr. Casas!" Sarah said effusively.

The professor smiled at her, and pulled out a copy of the school's course listings and a large pad of paper. "You are very welcome. Now, let's have a look at these classes."

* * *

The brass gate stood open before her, its rich luster picking up even the last, faint rays of evening sunlight as if to hoard them greedily through the night. Sarah's eyes wandered up and down its complex construction, which struck a masterful balance between strength and delicate ornamentation. Stylized birds soared between sturdy crossbars, and curling, metallic vines snaked around them, studded with sharp-looking thorns. The latch that Sarah remembered lifting a moment before was embellished in a lacy silver overlay that stood out like ice against the brass.

This time, when Sarah stepped across the threshold of the gate and into the Labyrinth, the world remained solid around her, and she could see that she was standing an endless-looking, featureless corridor that reminded her sharply of her first journey here. She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms, no small bit amused.

_Really now? This again?_

The walls shimmered lightly, as if seen from across a bonfire, and Sarah blinked. When her eyes came fully open again, the lines had re-formed, and she could see the myriad bends and openings and corners that characterized the enormous maze, and she laughed aloud.

_If stone walls could look sheepish… I think these just did. I wonder if I'll end up in an oubliette this time, too._ Sarah shook her head, still chuckling, as she chose an archway flanked by weathered stone sphinxes that lounged in indolent, immobile boredom against the wall.

As the twilight dimmed into full night, Sarah walked onward, nearly oblivious to the passage of time until torches suddenly flickered to life along the walls that flanked her. Startled, she quickly scanned the area for goblins, goblin monarchs, or any of the other, less glittery denizens of the Underground. By all appearances, though, she was still quite alone on the path, and she suspected she would be grateful for the torchlight soon, despite its faintly green cast. The flames themselves had a flash of emerald at their cores, as if they were burning something other than wax-soaked wood, and she wondered whether these used some kind of spiked mundane fuel, or were simply magic.

When Sarah turned a corner and found the new section of path awash in cool blue illumination instead, she decided that it must be the latter.

She was walking at a brisk clip, looking for some pattern in the colors, when she began to hear the music.

At first, it was only the slightest, tinkling chime, like the strands of a glass suncatcher clinking together in a soft breeze far away. Gradually, a percussive rhythm began to distinguish itself from Sarah's lightly scraping footsteps, later joined by the sharper beat of a tambourine. Finally, the faint, bright tones of what sounded like a wood flute skipped and trickled amidst the other sounds, and Sarah thought that the source seemed a little closer.

Minutes later, she rounded another bend in the path, where the wall threw bruised shadows through otherwise cheerful violet light, and was certain that the musicians were through an archway a few dozen yards ahead. Sarah reached the archway and paused, hesitant less from any thought of danger than from a worry of interrupting what sounded like a revel of some sort. Still, curiosity won that sortie by a landslide – a moment later, she ducked under a low-hanging ivy creeper and stepped quietly through the arch.

Then the bubble burst, and she opened her eyes to winter sunlight and the insistent bleating of her alarm. Sarah almost threw it across the room.

* * *

"Hey, weren't you in English 302 with me last semester?" Sarah looked up from her textbook in surprise. The speaker was a petite girl with short, sand-colored hair and friendly, grey eyes that she did, come to think of it, remember from the creative writing class.

Sarah quickly ran through as much of the class roster as she could remember, trying to recall the girl's name. "Yes, I was… Lauren, right?"

"Laurel, but that's closer than most people get," she corrected with a chuckle. "I'm terrible with names myself, so what's yours?"

Sarah turned slightly pink despite Laurel's attempt at making her comfortable. She _hated_ calling someone by the wrong name. "Sorry, nonetheless – I'd almost rather forget a name than remember the wrong one. And I'm Sarah."

"Sorry to bother you," Laurel said, nodding toward Sarah's textbook. "I just wondered if you knew anything about what happened to that last short story assignment we were supposed to turn in. I never got mine back."

"Oh, no worries – I'm glad for the distraction. The history elective this is for puts me to sleep." Sarah made a face at the book and set it aside. "There was an email after classes ended, you must have missed it. Dr. Casas has the hardcopies, with comments, at her office for us to pick up."

Laurel nodded. "Alright, thanks. I guess I'll swing by her office today or tomorrow and get it." She turned to go.

Noticing the lunchbag Laurel was carrying, Sarah made an impulsive suggestion. "Have a seat if you like, I was just about to put the book away and eat some lunch," she offered, moving her backpack off the other end of the bench.

"Okay, I'd love to, actually." Laurel grinned and sat down, cross-legged. "I normally eat in the north dining hall with some people from my eleven o'clock, but they can't freaking stop talking about the homework that's already been assigned, and I'm getting tired of listening. I'll think about the damn thing when I sit down to do it, not on my lunch break."

Sarah smiled, liking the girl already. She could certainly sympathize with a desire to escape from dwelling on work.

"What class is the homework for?" she asked.

"It's a problem set for Physics 102. I'm a chemistry major, and it seems like half the people in my class get their panties in a wad at the first mention of calculus." She snorted derisively.

Sarah's eyebrows rose. "Really? Hell, I was supposedly an econ major and most of them even could handle the basics."

"Yeah, I get the impression a lot of these guys thought chemistry was all funny squiggle-drawings and explosions. They're pretty disappointed now – we spent the first two entire sessions in lab learning how to AVOID blowing things up… which is a shame, but still!" Laurel added the last thought with a giggle. She cocked her head slightly to the side, inquisitively. "But you said 'was' an econ major. What are you now?"

"Back to Mythology, where I wanted to be in the first place. My dad didn't think much of that, so he made me change most of my classes last semester before registration closed. I've gotten a job at the library now, though, and Dr. Casas put me in touch with a high school to do some paid English tutoring, so… I don't need the little money he was giving me anymore."

Laurel gave her an admiring look. "Wow. And to think everyone in the sciences tells me you liberal artsies are lazy. That's pretty kickass. How'd he take it?"p>

Sarah sighed. "I'll find that out when I go home for the long weekend coming up. I made the decision over winter break, but only just got the work lined up last week. I wanted to have that bit nailed down before I said anything."

"Probably smart," Laurel said with a small nod.

"Yeah, I think so. I'm pretty nervous about telling him, still, to be honest," Sarah admitted.

"Eh, you'd be a robot or something if you weren't. It sounds like you've made up your mind, though – just have to stick to your guns."

Sarah picked at her neglected turkey sandwich as she nodded, and Laurel started inhaling a bag of grapes.

"So if you're a chemistry major," Sarah asked after a short, comfortable silence, "what was with the creative writing class? What else do you like to do?"

Between bites, Laurel answered. "They forced me to take some English class, and it fit. Turned out to be kinda awesome; Dr. Casas was cool. And I was able to dig up some of the old stories I wrote as a kid and clean them up for some of the assignments. As for the rest, if I'm not in class, I'm usually in a theater. Sound tech, set, props, costumes – something backstage needs doing, I do it. I'm going to try to latch onto one of the drama clubs' lighting people and brush up on that, too."

Sarah's eyes lit up. "That's really neat! I dabbled in theatre like you said you did writing, when I was younger and had more free time. What plays are you working on this semester?"

Laurel blinked at her, lips twitching up into another quicksilver grin. " _Much Ado About Nothing_ , and _Waiting for Godot_ … so far. I'm kinda looking for more, even though I know I really shouldn't. You should come see them when they go up!"

"I would love to," Sarah replied, lunch forgotten again. "I adore Shakespeare, and _Godot_ is pretty strange, but leaves so much room for interpretation."

"Shakespeare's a favorite of mine, too, though what I _really_ want to work on of his is _Macbeth_. It's popular enough that I think there's a good chance it will happen sometime before we graduate."

Laurel's lunchbag joined Sarah's in a dejected heap on the ground beside them, as they continued to chatter about books and plays until the clock in the quad noisily intruded. The two girls hurried in separate directions to their afternoon classes, but not before a quick exchange of email addresses and a promise to eat lunch together again.

* * *

Sarah took a deep breath to steady her nerves, and took the plunge.

"Dad? Karen? I need to talk to you about something," she said as she entered the living room, doing her best to sound calm and sure of herself, though she felt anything but.

Robert Williams looked up from his magazine, and Karen from her book, both seated comfortably on the overstuffed couch in front of the flickering TV. An aging rock band was giving a live-televised performance; Sarah didn't recognize the musicians, but the lead singer had a shock of (definitely dyed) scarlet hair that made her want to giggle. "Well, we're listening," her father said as he put aside the glossy pages. "Something to do with school?"

"Yeah, it's about my major and my classes," Sarah nodded and sat down in the easy chair, willing herself not to clench her hand in the thick upholstery of the armrest. "You know I got to skip the entry-level math classes, so I was into the thick of econ last semester." Her parents waited in silence. "I understood the material and did well with it, but… I hated everything about it, and the thought of doing any of _that_ for a living is… just awful." She pressed on quickly, not wanting to be stopped before she said what she needed to, the statement that had required the conversation in the first place.

"I put a lot of thought into it, and talked to my professors, and decided to switch back to Mythology in the English department. Several of the faculty there actually have a pretty wide network of contacts in the workforce for writing and editing local publications, so I'm confident that I'll be able to use that to help me find a job after I graduate." Sarah opened her mouth to say more, but closed it instead, not wanting to babble. She'd see what they had to say, then respond to their arguments or play her trump, as necessary.

Her father was frowning, but Karen looked unconcerned. Sarah made a note of that, hoping that her stepmother might prove at least a partial ally if she kept her head and argued well. Karen's book joined her husband's on the dark oak side table.

"Sarah, we've been over this already, and I'm disappointed that you seem bent on wasting your time in college," Robert began, severely.

_Oh dear, that's not a great start_.

"The fact that _some_ people, _somewhere_ got jobs with that sort of frivolity does not mean it is reasonable for you to expect to do so," he added.

"You should know by now that if I care about something, I'll put in whatever effort it takes to make it work. Remember all the advanced classes in high school, and the writing I was doing at the same time? I'm already applying that to this. I'm planning on building a network all through college, as well as my writing portfolio, so I'll have options when I finish."

"That's an impressive amount of forethought on how you might make the mythology major work, Sarah," Karen put in. Robert threw her a brief, scorching glare at the encouragement, but she ignored it. "But have you put the same thought into other options in school?"

"I've talked to professors and an academic advisor about the options and what the different departments are like, yes," Sarah replied firmly, before her father could voice the sentence that looked to be on the tip of his tongue. "Obviously I can't sample every major at the school before I choose, but I did as much research as I could on the topic even back during last semester. I'm sure this is what I want to do."

Robert spoke up, anger coloring his voice. "The discussion we had last semester about this issue was not a _suggestion_ , young lady, to be used or discarded as it pleased you. It sounds like you've forgotten that I am your father, you are my daughter, and Karen and I are paying for your education. We do not want to see our money and your time going to waste."

_So that's how it's going to be. Alright then, here goes…_

Sarah kept her tone utterly calm, though her anger flashed from her eyes, she was sure. "I have tried to explain why I am wasting neither time nor money, but if you don't believe me, then keep your money. I've got a part-time job at the school library, and Dr. Casas also helped me get set up in a paid tutoring program with one of the local high schools. I'll be making enough money to cover what my scholarships don't."

_There. Now for the fireworks._

Karen looked surprised, and even a touch amused, at Sarah's revelation. It was a welcome contrast to the colors her father was turning.

Robert surprised his daughter, however, with silence. He didn't yell, as she had expected – only sat with a look that made both Sarah and Karen fear for his blood pressure.

After a long, awkward minute, he finally spoke. "I… see. I am not amused – " he said with another Look at his wife, " – but Karen and I will talk about this."

Sarah nodded, recognizing the dismissal, and quit the room with a grateful half-smile at Karen.

...

"I can't _believe_ she pulled that," Robert Williams hissed out of nowhere as he and Karen were cooking dinner the next evening, after Sarah had returned to school.

Karen shrugged. "She's smart, mule-headed, and eighteen. You can't keep that tight of a leash on kids at that age, it just doesn't work."

"No one ever told my parents that when I was Sarah's age, and they did just fine at it."

Karen put down the carrot she was peeling and raised an eyebrow at him. "And how much did you resent them for it?" Robert didn't answer.

Eventually he sighed. "I'm not sure what to do. I don't think I can just back down, but I would feel like a terrible parent to just yank the funding, even if it wouldn't stop her."

"It may not be an easy choice, but from my point of view it's a pretty simple one," Karen said mildly. "Your pride, or your daughter. You get to keep one of them." More gently, she added, "and I think that in the future, being on speaking terms with Sarah will be more important to you than this."

* * *

The ivy creeper caught at Sarah's hair, scattering tiny, bright droplets of dew across its glossy length. She carefully disentangled herself and stepped forward through the archway into the fluttering orange glow of a new set of torches.

_Fluttering? The witchlights were all steady…_

Down a short pathway to her left, Sarah could see natural firelight set in what looked like a clearing, and goblinoid shapes thrown into dark silhouette in front of the bonfire. The eldritch music issued from these dancing shadows, and as she looked more closely, she noticed the suggested outline of instruments in their hands.

A touch of wariness invaded Sarah's unquenchable curiosity, as unwelcome as the feeling was. She turned toward the archway, and was only half surprised when she found that it had simply been erased. Only smooth, stone wall stood where she had entered, and the long ivy frond crawled down from the top of the wall, firmly anchored to its stones.

" _No, that's the dead end behind you!"_ Sarah could almost hear the card-like door guards' laughter all over again. She sighed, squared her shoulders, and headed for the clearing instead.

The musicians did not notice her immediately, as she stood in the shadows of the wall, and she would have rather liked for them never to have noticed. They were goblins, but of a spindly, sharp sort of build that Sarah didn't recognize, and their faces were pinched and cunning rather than silly. Their heights and coloration differed, as did their skin tones, and the only thing that all seemed to have in common was a dark-colored, shapeless hat that hung down past their hairy, pointed ears.

Something urgent tugged at Sarah's memory, but she couldn't quite latch onto what it was. Misgivings aside, the only way out of the segment of maze she was in was the clearing, and she could see the outline of what looked to be a bridge on the far side, beyond the fire. She would have to cross the clearing, one way or another.

As Sarah eased her way into the circle of firelight, trying to keep as close to the walls (now thorny hedges instead of stone) as she could, one of the goblins stopped playing, and _sniffed._ Sarah froze.

The creature turned around slowly, letting its flute fall to its side, and a moment later, its companions noticed and followed suit. When they saw Sarah, their faces broke out into nearly identical leers.

"Why, it's a little lady, fellas! Why does the little lady stay in the shadows? She should join us by the fire, she should!" the first goblin crowed.

"Yes, yes! Join the Bog Gang for some fun tonight!" chorused the others. When Sarah didn't move, the first took a few paces toward her, plainly trying to look friendly, and failing utterly. She took a step to the side, instinctively inching toward the other end of the clearing, and the changed angle of the light allowed her to get a better glimpse of the group.

Their ugly hats, which Sarah had thought to be some shade of brown, were a deep, rusty red.

_Redcaps!_ All the unpleasant things she'd read about this particular type of fae came crashing into her head at once, along with a heavy dose of fear.

"I… I can't, I'm sorry. I didn't want to disturb you, I just needed to pass through. I'm terribly late, you see," she managed.

"I thinks the little lady is late for supper," one of the redcaps called. "She should stay and haves it with us!" It started toward her from the far side of the fire.

"Ahh, no, thank you… my friend will be angry with me…"

They were all advancing on her, now, and Sarah promptly decided that speed would be a much better ally than lame excuses. She bolted to the left.

The redcaps abandoned their façade of politeness immediately, and jumped at her, baring sharp, mottled teeth.

Sarah dodged one's lunge, slipped sideways, and nearly got herself mired in the hedge, but managed to change direction quickly enough to avoid all but a scraped wrist from the briars. She kicked another squarely in the head as it came for her, but brief pause in forward motion allowed another to catch hold of her hair.

Shrieking, Sarah sprinted forward as suddenly as she could, and the redcap slid free. The bridge was just ahead of her now, and she stumbled onto it and tried not to notice the depth of the chasm that yawned beneath it.

_The Bog of Eternal Stench was tame compared to this. Apparently this Labyrinth means business!_

It was that much more alarming when she felt the ancient, moss-covered stones begin to give way beneath her.

Sarah gritted her teeth and grabbed the coarse rope handrail, prepared to climb up it if the bridge failed before she could make it across. The redcaps, strangely, were piled up at the base of the bridge, none of them setting foot on it. One of them had a knife working against her handrail, though.

Sarah cursed under her breath and switched hold to the other, but discarded the idea in favor of a flying leap to the far bank when she felt more stones dislodging.

She landed on her hands and knees against the muddy ledge, gasping, and staggered to her feet to keep running just as the bridge collapsed fully behind her. The hungry redcaps howled in frustration from across the chasm.

Sarah awoke in her bed at school in the predawn hours, still feeling winded, and her wrist ached faintly. A slightly alarmed glance downward confirmed that she had simply been sleeping on it strangely, and the skin was unbroken. Sarah slowly relaxed, and decided to use the extra time before class to get some writing done.

The crystal shimmered mutely on her nightstand.

* * *

"Alright, Sarah, you've got to help me," Laurel announced as she lowered her backpack to the floor with a groan of relief.

Sarah finished typing the sentence she had been in the middle of, saved her file, and looked up from the laptop screen, squinting up at her best friend in the afternoon sunlight.

"What with? It had better involve faeries – I think I've got too much pixie dust on the brain right now to be much use with anything else."

Laurel grinned, and ran her fingers through her sweat-streaked hair. It stood on end, making her look even more disheveled than her ripped jeans and dusty t-shirt did already. Sarah suspected she'd just come from rigging in the school's small theatre. "Lucky both of us, then – it involves faeries like my physical chemistry lab involves headaches."

Sarah gave her an incredulous look. "Really now? I'm listening!"

"Well, you know how I was only going to do the one play this semester, what with my department deciding that sophomores need to take nine thousand lab hours?" Sarah nodded. Her own second-tier classes were piling on the reading and essays more than ever, but it didn't particularly bother her. "Jen conned me into another one. She got the part in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ , and then found out they didn't have a costume designer. I was, uh, volunteered _in absentia_." Laurel made a face.

Sarah tilted back her head and laughed. "So here you are, to save the day, and you're calling in me as the expert on faerie regalia." Laurel's girlfriend was also active in theatre, in front of the curtain while Laurel stayed behind it. Jen had enlisted both Laurel and Sarah's help with props and other odds and ends several times over the last year.

"Exactly! Does that mean you'll help me out?" she asked, hopefully. "I really couldn't think of a better choice than you, with that novel you're working on, and all."

"If the faeries are supposed to actually look like faeries, and not some weird contemporary version where they're space aliens or something…"

Laurel nodded. "Oh yeah. I think it's set in modern times, but the faeries are totally still faeries, with wings, and feathers, and glittery shit."

"… _feathers, and glittery shit…" This could be surreal_. Sarah blinked at her friend bemusedly for a moment before answering. "Count me in, then. The image of Queen Maeve that I have in my head for the story would actually be close to perfect for Titania. I'd have to make it a bit less fierce, and more flighty… " She trailed off, already reaching for a notebook to start sketching. "And some kind of forest-lord theme for Oberon…"

"Sarah, you rock. This is going to look fantastic." Laurel flopped into an adjacent chair and started pulling out her own notes from her talk with the director. "Also," she added with a sly look at her friend, "just wait till you see the guy cast as Oberon. If I liked men, I'd be drooling all over him, just like half the girls in the cast."


	4. It Will Show You Your Dreams (Part 2)

"Laurel? Could I… if you're not busy, mind if I come over? I need to get away from here," Sarah asked, knowing that her voice must sound unsteady even over the phone.

"Of course, I was just killing time." A pause. "You okay?"

Sarah sighed. "It's… it's… well, I ended it."

"Oh! Get your butt over here – you didn't even have to ask, you know that!" Laurel's exasperated voice squawked at her.

"Alright, thanks. I'm on my way."

Sarah smiled faintly at Laurel's muttered "it's about bloody time" as she hung up. She knew that her friend wasn't referring to her last statement, but the one before it.

Laurel had moved to a small studio apartment just across the street from campus a few weeks ago, saying that she was sick of the dorms and didn't want to spend her senior year in the same building as a gaggle of new freshmen. Sarah had considered doing the same, but decided that the extra expense wasn't worth it. If she kept her spending down for this last year of school, she would have saved enough by graduation for the new car she sorely needed, thanks to the money she had been making at her library and tutoring jobs over the years. Her father and Karen had called her a few weeks after she had thrown down the gauntlet in her second semester and told her that they would continue to send her money for school, on the condition that she kept working hard and saved what she earned for expenses after college.

"Door's unlocked!" Sarah heard through the door in answer to her knock. Somewhat winded from the four-story climb to Laurel's apartment, she had no chance to catch her breath; no sooner than she had stepped into the room and put her backpack down, Laurel met her with a rib-cracking hug that Sarah would have sworn could never have come from someone so small.

Sarah made a noise that was part strangled giggle, part sob, and hugged her back.

When Laurel finally let go, she shooed Sarah toward the one comfortable chair in the apartment, an only-slightly-shabby find from the Salvation Army that was almost as ugly as it was soft. ("Hey, it's a thirty-dollar easy chair. It could be _upholstered in Ewok print_ and I'd still buy it!" Sarah had giggled and agreed.) She collected two beers from the refrigerator, handed Sarah the lighter one, and sat in the desk chair nearby.

"Alright. Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to get drunk and play Scrabble?"

Sarah laughed weakly and took a tentative sip of the beer. "Well, if this is what you have to get drunk on, I think I'd better talk."

Laurel snorted a laugh. "Hey, I'd agree with you if I bought crappy beer, but that's Harp! S'not my fault you're a snobby wine-drinker. I'd offer you my Guinness, but I doubt you'd like that better."

Sarah smiled, a bit more relaxed, and took another, longer swallow. It actually wasn't half-bad, she decided.

"Kidding, at least this has flavor – and thanks. I think I needed a drink."

"I kinda figured." Laurel waited, and at length, Sarah sighed and spoke again.

"Like I told you a few times, it felt like the relationship was spiraling downhill all summer." Laurel nodded. They had spent a lot of time on the phone, often with Sarah very upset.

"Well," she continued, "there were a lot of things wrong, but… you'll probably find this funny, and yes, you can laugh… the final straw was that he accused me of cheating on him."

Laurel raised her eyebrows over her beer glass, not finding this particularly remarkable or funny.

"With you."

Guinness sprayed out of her nose, and she doubled over, laughing and swearing as she tried to avoid sloshing the glass and losing more of it.

" _Seriously?"_ she asked, wiping her face with a tissue, and blowing her nose.

"Seriously."

"That idiot. Good fucking riddance," she said, shaking her head in disgust. "Even if Jen wouldn't _eviscerate_ me, and you liked women, that would still be a beyond stupid thing to say. I meant it before, and I mean it even more now – you're better off without him."

Sarah nodded, slowly, her amusement from Laurel's Guinness mishap fading as the sad frustration showed through again. "I know. I've known it for a long time, I guess. It still hurts like crazy, though. I miss the feeling that first semester had, working on _Midsummer_ with you guys. I really felt like, then, there was something special happening."

Laurel nodded, sympathetic. "I know. It always starts like that. It looked to me like you fell for the faerie king character he was playing, and then the play was over, and David was just… "

" 'Another vain jackass who thinks I'll look good on his arm and better in his bed?' " Sarah finished for her, quoting one of her friend's favorite epithets wryly.

"…right. That. You know me too well." Laurel made a face.

"You talk a lot," she countered, finally smiling. "You were right, I know. It was hard to see, though, at first – it really seemed like he was interested in me, and my goals, and in being my friend."

"He probably was, you know? Even I didn't think he was all bad at first. Short attention-span for people, though, I think." She grinned wickedly, adding, "and you didn't fawn over his glorious manliness like all the baby freshmen all the time, either."

Sarah snorted. "If that's what it takes to keep a guy happy, I'll be an old maid with a dozen cats instead."

"Or you could always switch teams!" Laurel pointed out, helpfully.

"I think I'll give men a few more chances – I'm not exactly old yet," Sarah retorted.

Laurel raised her half-empty glass in salute. "Well, then, a toast to good friends, good beer, and tilting at windmills."

Sarah laughed, and clinked her glass against Laurel's. "I'll drink to that."

* * *

The sounds were the first thing she became aware of.

A lively flute threaded its imperative melody over and through a din of conversation and rustling clothing. Drums so low that each measured beat seemed to reverberate through Sarah's body and keep time with her heart underlaid all the noise in the room, a sound felt more than heard. A duo… no, trio of stringed instruments that she could not name wove between the drums and flute in a complicated harmony, somehow heard above every other sound in the room without competing against them.

Gradually, the flashes of light and dark that Sarah was seeing resolved into a ballroom with a dance in full swing, with the dancers a riot of swirling, colorful attire and grotesque masks.

She looked down, expecting to see the frothy confection of a princess's ballgown that she had been wearing in another dream years before. The fabric that sheathed her body was indeed still silver-on-white, and it was a dress, but that was where the resemblance ended. Smoothly tailored silk flowed like water down her body, hugging her figure until halfway down her thighs, where it grudgingly loosened into a graceful, slightly flared skirt that nearly brushed the marble floor. The bodice was lightly boned, and pricked with understated mother-of-pearl beading; cool air on her back informed her that there was lacing there, but little else. Her shoulders were bare, but tight, sheer white sleeves flowed out of the bodice to cover the length of her arms. Exploring her face with careful fingers revealed that she also wore a mask, though hers had the smooth outline of a simple domino rather than any of the more fanciful and complicated shapes she saw on the other revelers.

_Well, this is different. I almost feel like I belong, rather than like some hunted game bird_.

Sarah heard a tinkling sound nearby, and turned to see a woman accepting a pair of champagne flutes from a masked waiter in dark livery. The peacock-colored woman floated off to find whoever she had collected the second drink for, and the waiter approached Sarah.

"One for you, my lady?" he asked, inclining his head courteously.

"Ah, no, thank you. I was just about to join the dance," she answered as politely as she could, and the waiter moved on. Wonderful as the golden liquid looked and smelled, her instincts against accepting food or drink were hard to ignore, given the circumstances.

_I bet it's peach nectar_ , she thought, sardonically. _That would be just too perfect._

"Pardon me, but did I hear you express interest in dancing?" A low, masculine voice cut through every bit of noise in the room, from a few paces to her left. "Or were you planning on doing so without a partner?" He added, his words rich with amusement, and what sounded like challenge.

Sarah froze.

_So here we are._

Another heartbeat, and she was turning to face him. A wave of self-consciousness passed over her as she remembered how revealing her dress was, but it swept away almost as quickly as she focused on the man who was awaiting her answer.

He was dressed from head to toe in a dark, shimmering emerald that reminded Sarah of dewfall on leaves in a moonlit forest, and his intricate leather mask was the Green Man. Pale hair framed the mask and feathered his shoulders, accentuating the sharp lines of his face that the mask did not quite hide. His thin lips were quirked slightly upward, an expression that could have been friendly or dangerous, or easily both. The barest suggestion of a frown creased Sarah's brow as she half-recognized his attire, which seemed familiar to her in a way she could not place. But he stood with the easy, predator's confidence that none save he had ever possessed, to her eyes, and she remembered that she had still not spoken.

Fluidly, she swept a belated curtsey, and as the fabric of her gown slithered from her fingers, she greeted him. "You did, and I was not. I would be glad to partner you, my lord."

He smiled at that, revealing pointed teeth as he took her hand in his gloved one and stepped with her onto the dance floor.

Though the floor was crowded, there always seemed to be space for them to move as gaps unerringly opened in the press of revelers just as they shifted directions. Sarah had the sense of a great deal of time passing, as the music shifted in tempo and mood over and over again, but there was no fatigue, and no reason to stop.

She knew her feet were tracing a complicated step beneath her, but the only feeling she was aware of was the firm, but feather-light connection to her partner. His hands were flames, muffled by the soft leather of his gloves, and she could not help but wonder what they would feel like bare.

As if in response to her thought, his lips parted in a wicked grin, and he bent his head to speak to her for the first time since the dance began.

" _Then, my queen, in silence sad, trip we after the night's shade:_

_We the globe can compass soon, swifter than the wandering moon._ "

The hand he had been resting on her waist slid around to the small of her back, pulling her close to him, and the ballroom melted away.

...

She was lying on soft, pale fabric, and at first she thought that it must be her dress beneath her.

The realization came quickly: the dress was nowhere in evidence (certainly not on her body), and the cool cloth under her hip and side was a satin sheet. Nearly every inch of skin not against the sheet was in burning, _singing_ contact with the lithe man beside her – and the hands that skated all across her body were as bare as the rest of him.

Sarah opened her mouth to say his name, but the word was left unspoken as he kissed her.

...

She awoke with a light film of sweat on her skin, twisted between her cotton sheets, and wondering how her pajamas had ended up on the floor.

* * *

It was four in the morning, and Sarah had not slept.

She had come back to her room the previous evening after her last final exam, and resolved to write until the graduation ceremonies a week off, if she had to, to finish her novel. Marie, who had been her roommate all throughout college, had gone home that morning with plans to return with her family for commencement, and Sarah was grateful that she did not have to worry about keeping her lights dim and her music on headphones. It was easier to stay awake that way.

A thrice-refilled tea mug sat cooling near her mousepad, and the words on the bright computer screen were starting to swim before her eyes, but she could not stop. She was too close to the end. The last chapter had practically written itself, as Janet and Tam Lin finally escaped from the wrathful faerie Queen, and now Sarah's fingers flew across the keyboard as the epilogue took shape.

The couple did not return to the lands of Janet's father in Sarah's tale, but claimed the forest of Carterhaugh as their own domain, both having acquired a measure of power in their own right from their contact with the Fae. They ruled it long and well, as Sarah had intended from the beginning of the story, but a final flash of inspiration prompted her to add an extra, last scene.

" _Many years later, on a crisp autumn morning, a young boy became separated from his father's hunting party. He had dismounted to stretch his legs and dallied by a stream, and was accidentally left behind. When he realized he was alone, his frightened cries startled a sleeping owl, whose angry screech spooked his horse into bolting. Even more worried without his mount, he stumbled deeper into the woods after it, not realizing that more than birds had heard his calling."_

A slow smile spread across her face as she typed the last sentence.

_Let them wonder what the new Lord and Lady of that forest will do._

Sarah stretched, her joints crackling in protest at the long hours spent in her desk chair. She rose, thinking to finally fall asleep happy, when the lamplight caught and flashed in the depths of the crystal that was still ensconced on her nightstand.

Fatigue fled before a sudden rush of heady impulse. The night seemed too perfect to ignore it.

_I wonder if… he would come if I asked. I need to thank him for the dreams, at the very least – they kept me feeling like I had one foot into the Underground all these four years._

… _Right, Sarah, you just tell yourself that that's the only reason. As Laurel would probably say, whether you do it for the wrong reasons or the right ones, you're gonna do it anyway._ She snorted, amused, and gently cupped the crystal in both hands.

The doubts kept her lips sealed for long moments, as she struggled with fear, and anxiety, and a dozen other emotions she would have been hard-pressed to put a name to. Just keeping the crystal near her had seemed like risk enough, when it had first appeared on her dresser. Surely she must be insane now to consider actively inviting _him_ , in the flesh, into her home again. He was capricious and powerful and _dangerous_ , and she needed to treat things a bit more seriously than some children's fairytale and _yet_ …

…What about the _last_ time she saw him? Sarah blushed at the thought.

_How much will you regret it, if you never take the chance and try?_

That settled it.

A whole new anxiety took hold, then – that she would call, and he _wouldn't_ answer. At that moment, that seemed like a worse outcome than any of the others her mind had concocted.

Nothing to do but try.

Looking down, into the crystal she held in her palms, she took a deep breath, and whispered, "I wish the Goblin King would come here to talk with me, right now."

The silence stretched into what felt like an eternity, and much to her consternation, Sarah felt tears well up in her eyes.

He wasn't coming.

Sadly, she moved to put the crystal back down, but stopped short as she remembered.

_Wait. The feather._

Quickly, she transferred the crystal to her left hand and turned to her dresser. The feather had stayed in its jewelry-box home since the day it had appeared, and when she drew it out, it was as soft and supple in her hand as it had been the last time she'd held it.

Sarah's hands shook slightly as she held the crystal and feather together, and tried again, in a louder, more imperatively clear voice.

"I wish the Goblin King – Jareth – would come here to talk with me, right now."

A rush of displaced air ruffled her loose, dark hair, followed almost immediately by a soft, rasping chuckle from across the room.

Her heart pounding, Sarah raised her eyes to meet the piercing, mismatched stare of the Goblin King, who leaned insouciantly against the wall as if he had been waiting there all night for her to notice.

In a voice that was a lion's purr cut by a razor, he spoke.

"Well, well, Sarah. I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever think to call. It has been an _awfully_ long time."


	5. Whimsy and Recklessness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (E-cookies for correctly identifying what's going on in the second dream Jareth describes...)

For a moment, Sarah could only look at him.

He wore the black and grey that she recalled from long ago, but somehow, every line of him was sharper, cleaner, and more pronounced in its unearthly grace than even his appearance in her ballroom dream. His shirt was dove-colored lawn, draped in loose sleeves, but leather cuffs rose halfway up his forearms and left his gloved fingers unobstructed. The hem tucked into snug, leather trews, which in turn ended in soft boots at the knee. The tattered-raven cloak that had once made him the very image of a storybook villain was gone, yet its shape was echoed in the twisted points of the collar on a fitted, ebony vest.

His hair was as she remembered – the color of sunlight on un-dyed silk, its softness in stark contrast to the knife-keen features it framed. One up-swept eyebrow was raised along with one corner of his mouth, as he waited for her to speak in smug enjoyment.

Sarah swallowed, attempting to hold her expression calm and neutral as she inclined her head to him.

"Long enough, though I'd have you know I _thought_ to call several times – it's just that I was only crazy enough to go through with it tonight."

He didn't speak for a few long seconds, and she worried slightly that she'd managed to insult him, but then he tilted his head back in quiet, surprisingly warm laughter.

"I see. Well then, I suppose I should take what amusement I can out of a delightfully impetuous mortal woman calling on me, lest her derangement prove only temporary."

"Amusement, huh?" She carefully ignored the rest of his sentence, thinking it better not to contemplate until much later – preferably alone.

"Of course. It was shaping up to be a terribly tedious evening before three minutes ago." He flicked fine-boned fingers dismissively. "So. You have wished, and it pleased me to answer. To what do I owe the… honor?" The last words were pitched low and intimately, and Sarah blushed faintly without quite being able to define why.

"Curiosity," she answered slowly. "A bit of whimsy… a healthy dose of recklessness."

Jareth smiled, showing teeth. "You have never been lacking in that."

_Don't let him make you uncomfortable._

… _Okay, that's a lost cause. Don't let it show._

She acknowledged his comment with a slight shrug, as if to say that it was true enough but not concerning, and forged on. "I also wanted to thank you. For… for the dreams. They pulled me along to finish this story I started writing, when I think I would have given up, otherwise."

At this, Jareth's brows furrowed slightly, then eased as a wicked gleam entered his eyes. "For the crystal and the feather, you are welcome, of course. But any dreams you may have had…" Her reaction to that must have been fascinating, for he stopped talking to watch with a slow-spreading grin. Sarah's face felt hot, but she forced herself to hold his gaze.

"…didn't come from me, or any working of mine. They're all from your own head, lovely Sarah."

_Satin sheets and feathery hair and heated skin-on-skin, his lips firm and smooth and harsh all at once as they pressed against hers…_ If Sarah had been blushing before, her face was surely on fire now.

In three long, fluid strides, he stood just before her. They were almost of a height, but somehow he seemed taller. She could feel power radiating from him like shed body heat as he leaned slightly toward her, still smiling that tight, puppetmaster's smile. One gloved finger rose before her face, and for a fleeting moment she thought he would touch her, but he merely indicated the sweep of her cheekbone as he spoke.

"From the wonderful shade of scarlet your skin is turning, they must have been some _delicious_ dreams."

Her voice vice-bound to steadiness, Sarah answered as lightly as she could manage. "Oh, you could say that for one or two of them."

As suddenly as he had closed the distance between them, he now backed away a pace, though still looking highly amused. Sarah's curiosity flared, and she asked the question before her mind had even fully framed it.

"Could you not watch them, then? I thought that mortal dreams must surely be an open book to you."

A stormcloud rolled over his face, gathering to harden and crystallize in his eyes. His voice, though still quiet, took on a dangerous edge.

"So firmly she asserts herself, so quickly she forgets." His wrist made a flourishing flick, and a crystal appeared in his hand. Four others joined it one by one, though Sarah never actually saw any one of them pop into being; he simply was revolving one around in his palm, then two, then a pyramid of five. Jareth held the entire mass up to his eyes, and the crystals' innocuous clarity was replaced by a picture in the depths of each. Sarah could not tell what he saw from where she stood, but she didn't have to wonder long.

"Your neighbor downstairs dreams of forgetting some school assignment, and of showing up to class without it." The top crystal in the pyramid lobbed itself in her direction, and Sarah barely reacted in time to catch it before it hit the floor. Inside, she could indeed see a classroom, and a girl she recognized from the dining hall sitting alone in the rows of seats, babbling what must have been excuses. The crystal disappeared, bursting like a soap bubble even as she comprehended its contents.

Jareth continued. "Another young woman down the hall dreams of tall, violet-skinned elves riding great cats into battle against a demon the size of a mountain." Sarah caught this one more gracefully, and saw a single human girl riding alongside the strange army, charging past a tree whose branches were lost in the clouds.

"Another sits among rows and rows of people her age in dark gowns and flat caps, while she herself is naked and shivering, dreading her name being called." _Toss._ Two crystals remained, still revolving in his hand.

"Another is looking everywhere for a piece of jewelry that she misplaced." _Toss._ One crystal left.

"And another is flying over a bright, bustling city, her arms outstretched like wings." _Toss._

Now empty-handed, he crossed his arms over his chest. Sarah looked up as the last orb dissipated, matching his challenging regard with level equanimity.

"So think a little harder, Sarah, and tell me the answer to your question," he finished, his words laced with thin threads of frost.

She frowned, considering. He could clearly see mortal dreams, but his only statements concerning hers had been guesses based on the reactions she betrayed when they were mentioned. His touchy anger at her question indicated that he could not, in fact, watch the theatre of _her_ subconscious.

Why, then?

Her mind wandered back to the last few moments of her race to rescue Toby, when the Goblin King had tried to stop her from finishing what she had to say.

Then she knew.

" _You have no power over me."_

Those words had shattered the walls of the reality that held herself and Toby away from their own world, so long ago. She had defeated the Labyrinth, and so apparently won some sort of immunity from its ruler.

Jareth noticed the shift in her mien as the pieces fell into place, and he nodded stiffly before she answered.

"I won the game, with immunity as my prize."

Which realization should have been a comfort, except that it raised another, much more troubling question, and her eyes widened slightly. "…But I wished for you to come here. So where does _that_ leave me?"

A chuckle like the last peal of thunder as a storm abates, and the ice was gone. Yet his next words still raised her skin to gooseflesh.

"Very good, you see the rules a bit better, this time." Sarah wasn't sure how good that was, and her pulse was racing as she began to think that she may have committed the most colossally stupid mistake of her life that night.

"Why would I want to tell you, though? I have you at a disadvantage – even though you don't yet know how much of one." His eyes narrowed, like those of a cat that was enjoying itself far, far too much, and he waited for her response in languid, infuriating complacence.

Sarah's first inclination, which she soundly squelched, was to protest, and demand that he place himself on equal footing with her. It hadn't worked when she was fifteen, and she strongly doubted that it would be any more effective now. No – far better to keep her head, and play by his rules, or better yet, circumvent them. Petulantly pretending they didn't exist would do her no good whatsoever.

_He's trying to make me feel vulnerable, and so far it's working. If I let the adrenaline choose my actions for me, I'll do nothing but slip and fall into whatever trap he might set._

The irony amused her even as it stung. " _What's said is said._ " If calling him was a mistake, she had made it, and no amount of denial would alter that. However, if his intentions were malevolent, then _she had nothing to lose by boldness, when it had saved her before._

She laughed appreciatively, as if he had made some particularly clever jest, and was rewarded by his barely-checked start of surprise. This was most assuredly _not_ what he had expected from her.

"So you do, and I have no illusions that I could take back my wish even if I wanted to. But given that, it's best that I not worry too much about how hopeless my position may _or may not_ be, then, yes?" His face had been rearranged and solidified into an unreadable mask, as she continued. "And while words have power, I wished you here to talk. Shall I try to find the right ones to make you leave me be once more, and not make the _mistake_ of inviting you again in the future?"

He stood, silent and still as a marble statue, and Sarah had to remind herself to breathe. His next words or actions would give insight on the boundaries of his influence on her… or else slice open her bravado to reveal a hollow, empty core where she had hoped truth resided.

When finally he moved again, it was to bring his hands together in three slow, measured claps that were muffled only slightly by the fabric of his gloves. His voice was as inscrutably bland as his face as he answered.

"She forgets much, but learns well. _Brava_ , Sarah. You are a singularly perverse human creature."

From anyone else, it wouldn't have sounded like much of a compliment.

From him, the fact that the words were flat, even grudging, made it the highest praise in the world. The power and entitlement that usually hung like an almost visible aura around him was, for that brief instant, gone. That she could wring out wary respect from him where he had intended to be gloating in triumph was a heady victory that she did not overlook.

"I shall be perhaps far too generous and tell you, you are correct on the nature and… _precision_ of permissions with my kind. That you have called me here tonight gives me a degree more leverage where you are concerned, but no more than that. You needn't worry…" Jareth's mask cracked, and he smiled again, once more the cat eyeing some small, scurrying prey. "…much."

Sarah thought it likely that he was trying to psych her out again, but found herself strangely glad that his reaction had been what it was, and not to sweep off with anger or threats. This little barb at the end of his admission was positively tame, for him. She decided to press her luck.

"That makes some sense, but why is it that you could do all the things you did to interfere directly when I was running the Labyrinth?"

Shaking his head, he perched on the director's chair near her window. Sarah had to fight to suppress a giggle at the incongruous image of the Goblin King sitting on the bright, stretched canvas as if it were a throne. Jareth didn't seem to notice, crossing his legs as if he were completely at home in his surroundings, and eventually answering. "I should think it would nearly be obvious by this point, but very well. The challenge of the Labyrinth for one who has wished away a child has a very old, very expansive set of rules, with permissions woven throughout. To win the baby back, you had to defeat the Labyrinth, and I am its guardian." He quirked a winged eyebrow in her direction, sounding at once playful and mildly reproachful. "It would hardly be much fun if I couldn't do anything to affect the challenge, now would it?"

Sarah snorted. "Fun, indeed," she muttered under her breath. "Would the Cleaners, or the Fieries, or that monstrosity of a mechanical gate guardian have really hurt me if I hadn't gotten away?"

Another teeth-baring smile. "Did you believe that they would?"

She nodded, wordlessly.

"Well, then, it's best that you didn't let them catch you to find out, I should think." That statement was hard to argue with.

Sarah swallowed hard and resisted the urge to sit down in her desk chair to steady her legs. Better to stay at least at eye-level with him.

_For all he's being courtly and amiable (and fascinating and infuriatingly beautiful,_ another, rather irritating part of her brain chimed in), _don't let your guard down and forget that he was your enemy. You still don't really know why he's even here -_

_\- Well, ask him, silly!_

_Why would I – well, I suppose it can't hurt._

Jareth was watching her with interest, and she feared that at least some of her inner dialogue was playing out on her face. Still, she gathered herself, and spoke.

"You asked why I called. Did you come just to let me pepper you with questions, or was there another reason?" she asked, more bluntly than she had intended.

A crystal appeared in his hand, and he rolled it from palm to palm to forearms and back again with an idle precision that no mortal juggler had ever matched, his eyes glittering in the lamplight.

"Curiosity. A bit of whimsy." His voice held a note of mockery as he quoted her earlier words.

Sarah sat forward incredulously. "You really were just _bored_? That's hard to believe."

"Oh, is it? Tell me, Sarah, how much would you value novelty in a world where time is so endless it betimes loses its meaning, but where you feel each second, each minute pass through you? I am not a tree – or treant – or mountain, to measure heartbeats by epochs. And I daresay the brief excitement of a foolish mortal who wishes a child away has become quite the rarity over the last century in your world." But the glint remaining in his eyes told her that she had not quite heard all of it. There was something else, she was certain.

Finally, he sighed, and the crystal stilled in his fingers. "Truly, that would have been reason enough. But I do have another." Instead of tossing the crystal to her, this time, he blew on it gently, and it floated slowly to her hands like the soap bubble it resembled. "You did not know it at the time, but not long ago, you gave me a gift, and I would show it to you."

* * *

An enormous, yellow harvest moon hung low in a velveteen sky, and short footsteps elicited a light swish of protest from the wild grasses that covered the hillside.

The perspective of the scene felt strangely off-center to Sarah, and she realized that it was not her own dream. The dreamer was instead the small boy who scurried up the hill in dew-dampened jeans and ratty sneakers, not five yards from where Sarah stood.

She was just uphill of him, yet he did not seem to see her at all as he climbed, intent as he was on a small, rocky hollow above them both that looked as though some giant had taken a bite out of the hill. The sight of it jarred her, as she realized _she knew this place_ , hillside, moon, grass and all. Just as surely, she knew that the boy would have a carven stone figurine in his pocket.

The child reached the hollow and stopped, searching the stone face with eager fingers to find the hidden alcove that would accept the key he carried. Sarah climbed nearer, cautious about making noise at first, but faster once she realized that her passage did not even part the grasses beneath her feet. As she reached the edge of the exposed stone, the boy found what he was looking for.

A low, grinding rumble sounded from the hillside, and a larger opening formed where only solid rock had stood before. Warm, flickering light issued from inside, and the boy slipped through the crack in the hill without hesitation. Sarah did not need to look inside to know what he would find, but still she did so, curious what the boy himself would do.

She ducked through the crack to find a rough-hewn tunnel – also expected – though she was surprised to see bright paintings on some of the flatter sections of wall.

There had been no paintings in the story.

After perhaps two minutes of progress down the tunnel, she came to the well-lit workroom, where the gnarled, dwarflike creatures who resided there plied their lapidary's craft in an uncanny silence broken only by the scrape, tinkle, and whine of tools on precious stones. Or rather, it should have been in silence. Instead, the most wizened of the group was sitting next to the human child, speaking to him in low, gravely tones as he instructed the boy on crafting a silver setting for an opal.

The child exclaimed in delight as he executed a step correctly, and the scene dissolved around Sarah.

* * *

After a disoriented moment, she opened her eyes to find herself standing on dangerously wobbly legs back in her room. The crystal she held still displayed the workroom scene, and Jareth had conjured a new one that he rolled across his fingers while he waited for her to look up.

Sarah considered the dream-crystal for another handful of seconds, then spoke slowly, with dawning wonder in her voice. "That was one of my stories from high school… the one that was published in the faerie tale anthology. Someone was _dreaming_ about it?"

A hint of rare warmth entered Jareth's expression as he confirmed her guess. "Precisely so. It was vivid enough that the boy latched onto it, and made it a part of himself. You've given my realm another slim thread of connection to the mortal world."

He paused, and his expression grew grave. "And altogether too many of those have been cut, of late, with scant few new ones tied to replace them."


	6. Playing with Fire

"Cut," Sarah repeated, her voice soft as she tried to assimilate all the implications of what the Goblin King had said. "You mean, your world is tied to ours, but the ties are failing?" He inclined his head slightly. "Because… people are less superstitious?" she asked, frowning. "I'd always thought that a good thing."

Jareth shook his head, the crystal's motion across his fingers never faltering. "Not precisely. The superstitions of your world's younger days helped, of course, particularly the ones that spawned fears. Mortal fear is such a… potent… thing." His tone was light, but his eyes were unnervingly shuttered.

Sarah cupped the dream-crystal she still held, almost protectively. "And is that you playing the villain, then?" she challenged.

His laugh was a black, serrated thing, and Sarah caught herself just before she took an instinctive step back, away from him. "I play many, many games, lovely, _rash_ Sarah, but precious few would fit into the little boxes you try to build around them. You are clever, oh yes, but perhaps not as much as you think."

_The bastard can switch moods quicker than a spoiled two-year-old,_ Sarah thought, even as the rebuke chilled her. Then his eyes glittered in the lamplight, and her mouth went dry.

… _Or an ageless Fae lord dripping magic and authority. Let's not forget that, please,_ her sense of self-preservation reminded her pleasantly.

She took a slow breath through her nose to steady herself, then pointedly defied her own alarmed reaction by straightening her shoulders and stepping forward. "Enlighten me, then, O Goblin King. What is so special about fear?"

Another chuckle, silken-smooth, but with the promise of an edge beneath. If he was surprised by her advance, this time he did not show it. "Another odd thing to ask, for one with a storyteller's perception. Fear, like all strong emotions, and perhaps more than most, incites action. The need to survive, after all, is a rather immediate and difficult to ignore imperative." He paused, his mismatched eyes boring into Sarah's own. "Though of course, some mortals are especially contrary about putting even that aside."

Sarah laughed, a bit giddy. "Hey, we call it courage when it pays off," she pointed out, wryly.

"And suicidal folly when it doesn't," he replied, his lips twisting into a half-smile. "But fear does another very important thing, which you should be particularly familiar with."

She considered, the pad of her thumb tracing aimless patterns against the smooth surface of the crystal. The answer came to her, like a bubble rising slowly through her thoughts. "We create heroes to counter it. The brave knight with the enchanted sword who slays the dragon; the quick-witted princess who tricks the troll that plans to eat her." She raised an eyebrow in his direction. "The girl who solves an impossible maze to rescue her baby brother. They're all an answer to the same question – how we, the fragile mortals, can prevail against evil larger than ourselves."

The half-smile had become a fiercely amused grin when she mentioned the Labyrinth, and he answered with mock-affront. "Ahh, Sarah, you wound me so!"

She snorted. "Look, the jury's somewhat out on how evil I think you are right now, but you certainly filled that role then."

The grin widened, and he slid from the director's chair to his feet, stretching long, leather-clad legs and tossing his cobweb-fine hair out of his eyes. "For a surety, but that's no excuse for comparing me to a giant lizard or a foul-smelling troll!" Another heartbeat saw him just within arm's reach of her.

Sarah kept her eyes riveted to his face, adamantly refusing to let them roam. She wasn't sure whether the urge stemmed from fear or something more treacherously worrisome, but her internal debate on that subject was decisively cut off when the crystal in his hands disappeared, and one arm moved in her direction.

This time, he did touch her. Sarah smelled leather as two fingers traced a whisper-light line down her jaw, pausing at her chin to very gently tilt it upward. Even with such a small point of contact, she could feel the smoldering heat of his skin through the thin, supple gloves.

_Well, it seems my dream got that particular detail right_. Sarah managed to keep her eyes open and her breathing even, but could not suppress the light shiver that followed that realization. Jareth's grin took on a feral cast, and he bent his face close enough to her that his breath was warm on her forehead.

He spoke, his words a low, almost musical rasp that she could feel on her skin as much as she could hear it. "Must I demonstrate the shameful unfairness of that comparison?"

_YES!_ Quite a large portion of her subconscious cheered.

_Not on his terms_ , the shrewder part insisted.

_Spoilsport._ The disgruntled, hormonal majority stumped off to pout.

"No, I retract it," she said, and he stilled. "You're much more of an incubus."

He laughed, in the same texture as his gloves had been – soft, lush, and a little rough – and whispered, "Now _that's_ a name I wouldn't mind living up to." Sarah caught her breath as he looked at her, lingering mere inches from her face, her lips.

With a small half smile, he drew away, leaving her mind reeling. She could not have said what was stronger - her relief, or her frustration.

"While it's rather oversimplifying things, lovely Sarah, if you must cast me as a fairytale villain, close enough." He propped one arm on the director's chair, still standing. "But before you distracted me with your ghastly accusations, I believe I was making a much-needed clarification." Sarah nodded, listening.

"Superstition, as you put it, is unnecessary." He paused, and continued under his breath. "…however dreadfully amusing it is to feed and exploit." Sarah's first reaction to this was indignation, but the indignation turned to conspiratorial understanding fast enough that she surprised herself. His earlier comment on the tedium of time's passing had shed new light on every immortal trickster Sarah had ever encountered in myth… or experience.

She did not laugh, but he must have caught the change in her eyes, for he smiled.

"Mortals strengthen the connection between their realm and mine by wanting it so. They need not believe – superstitions are more of a pleasant bonus – but they need to _want_. They need to desire to reach beyond this…" He waved, indicating either the room, or the world at large; Sarah was not sure. "…this banality. The door that always opens on the same, static scene; the people who say the same tired, predictable words; a world whose breathing and patterns they cannot see or hear – only stumble about blindly like – " A sharp, tight smile. "Like _most_ foolish mortals stumble around in my Labyrinth."

Taken off-guard by the implicit compliment, Sarah stood quietly for a moment before she questioned him again. The smile remained on his face – fierce, but not unpleasant – and the deep-night silence stretched taut as a fiddle's strings.

She broke it fluidly, asking, "That makes sense, but if that's the case, why did the situation sound so dire when you first brought it up? I know plenty of mort- … people… who want something more magical than the life they're living."

His eyes were laughing at her turn of phrase, but he quickly sobered as he answered. "For the most part, those ties do not last. A moment's wistful fantasy is a fragile thing, quickly brushed away, quickly dismissed, quickly forgotten."

His hand moved in a small, quick gesture, and the crystal in Sarah's hand took on a cool glow that illuminated the scene that replayed within it. She started, nearly dropping the orb before recovering her equilibrium.

"A dream, however – that is something altogether different, and a hundredfold more meaningful."

Watching the tiny figures play out her story again, Sarah spoke slowly as her understanding grew. "A dream comes from the subconscious, so when the desire finds its way to expression in sleep… it has sunk roots into the deepest parts of the person's mind."

Jareth nodded, and pointed to the glowing crystal. "Keep it, and remember. You can dim or brighten it with a touch and a thought."

Sarah smiled, and for the first time that night, the expression was without wariness. She placed the crystal reverently on her desk, where it continued to shed its soft light. Her instinctive caution regarding the Goblin King murmured a quiet warning, but this gift was one she could not bring herself to view with suspicion. A tangible reminder that a creation of hers had fascinated a child enough to live it out in his own mind was beyond priceless to her.

"Thank you… very much. I will treasure it."

Jareth quirked a small, only slightly devilish smile, and cocked his head curiously. "You spoke of another story. You do this often?"

Somehow, Sarah was surprised that he was asking. It seemed strange to have Jareth asking her questions that involved her own – banal, as he had put it – world. She supposed it was because she had always expected him to be able to know such things; the revelation that he hadn't been able to watch her directly had not yet completely sunk in, given that she had suspected he was spying on her at least since the crystal appeared in her room.

Lightly, she answered, "Work on them often? Yes, very. Though tonight held the first I've finished in quite a while, since it's particularly long." Feeling unwontedly shy now that the topic was her own doings, she hesitated, then added, "I've wanted to be a writer for years."

This seemed to confuse him. "But you have been a writer for years, have you not?" His winged brows had drawn together in a frown.

Sarah laughed aloud, inordinately amused that for all his facility with smooth language, even so some turns of phrase did not seem to translate well between worlds. His frown deepened at her laughter, and she hurried to explain. "Sorry, what I meant was that I wanted to write as my profession. To make my living that way. What I'd written in the past won't do that for me, but I'm hoping the book I just finished might get me started."

The frown eased fractionally, though he still looked faintly like a bird with ruffled feathers. "I see. Is the subject matter similar to what the boy was dreaming?"

"In the sense that I drew from old legends, yes. There's a ballad that tells the tale of a woman named Janet, and her lover Tam Lin – " She trailed off, as he chuckled richly. "You know of it, then?"

"I know it very, very well. Quite aside from the fact that it is a tale of the borders between the realms of my kind and that of mortals, the subject matter is, shall we say… particularly relevant to me." Sarah's skin broke out into a shiver of gooseflesh. She had, of course, noted the analogy when she first heard the ballad – how could she not? – but it was quite another thing to hear him speak of it, and it raised a veritable cacophony of new questions in her mind. "That ballad is but one facet of a larger tale, one that was whispered fearfully at nightfall before ever it was sung."

"Child-stealers." Sarah put the name to it, still feeling chilled.

"Indeed." The word was not an admission, not a taunt, not a challenge – just a bald, unconcerned statement of fact.

Irrationally, Sarah felt as if she was the one who needed to justify her own actions simply in _using_ the tale as a framework. "The characters fascinated me. I wanted to explore what happened beyond the narrative in the ballad, to give faces and feelings and color to the names."

Jareth's rejoinder was a whipcrack of bitter amusement. "And tell another story about the heroics of a young woman who saves someone from the vile clutches of the faeries?"

Her answer was quiet and even, and seemed to hit him like a glass of cold water in the face. "No."

He paused in the middle of drawing breath for another barb, as thoroughly taken aback as ever she had seen him. Then he recovered himself, and his lips drew into a faint sneer. "Oh, truly? You'll forgive my reluctance to believe that, I hope. But I shall humor you – why, then, did you choose that particular story to retell?"

For all she understood his response, Sarah found herself bewildered and, infuriatingly, somewhat hurt to hear the venom in his voice.

_There I go, forgetting he hasn't been watching my every move, again. He couldn't know._

Dark humor followed on that thought's heels. _Well, His Insufferably Superior Majesty could stand to be surprised by something at least a few times a century, I suppose._

She met his acrimony with equanimity, keeping her voice quiet, but un-cowed. "It's about adventure, and love, and magic." Her next words deliberately echoed his earlier explanations. "And about reaching for that wondrous thing that might not even be there, but that you can't help trying to find, anyway."

Some unnamed emotion fluttered through his eyes almost – but not quite – faster than she could note it, and he turned his face away from her, toward the window. A dew-laden predawn breeze ruffled his thistledown hair, though Sarah remembered neither opening the window, nor seeing it opened. In profile, his face was as stone, and she stood for long moments in silence, unsure what to make of his reaction.

"When did it become so, to you?" His lips barely moved as he spoke, and his voice caught in a faintly dissonant frisson at the end of the question.

"Do you mean, when did it become about all those things, instead of about saving someone from child-stealing fae?"

A small nod.

"When do you think it did?"

He glanced sideways, eyes a flashing knife in the low lighting. "If you think me able to answer that, then I suppose when I left my… _tokens_ for you to find."

Despite the thrumming tension between them, Sarah had to bite back wry laughter.

_Just in case I didn't already know how highly he thought of himself... well, let him stew. He certainly seems to enjoy telling me to answer MY own questions._

"As wonderfully surprising as that was, no – guess again."

The eyes, once more turned away from her, narrowed. "I shall think on it."

Whatever the precise nature of his current mood, Jareth was as off-guard as ever Sarah had seen him. She hoped it meant he would answer her next question, with an involuntary reaction if not with words.

"What happens, as the connections between the worlds are cut?" she asked, softly. "Does your realm need ours to survive?"

Jareth drew a sharp, angry breath, and Sarah braced herself, but he let it out in a long, slow hiss rather than attacking her with words. When he answered, his tone was locked to blandness.

"To survive, no. But to flourish? That is another matter."

She thought that was all he was going to say, and was considering pressing the question, when he spoke again. "Tell me, clever Sarah – what did the Labyrinth look like to you?"

She blinked, wondering what he was getting at.

"When I was fifteen, you mean?"

Finally turning toward her again, he raised an eyebrow. "When else?"

_Oh, right. He could only guess at my dreams._

"I dreamed of it, many times over the last four years. Those were the dreams I had thought to thank you for, originally."

"I shall try not to feel too cheated not to have seen them, then, though it is _terribly_ difficult." A bit of texture had returned to his speech, and Sarah allowed herself to relax, slightly. She understood this face of him, insofar as any mortal could, and certainly moreso than she had the flat, aloof bearing he had just discarded. "Tell me of both, or all, if the dreams were different from one another."

"Well, the first time… the first word that comes to me is 'dry.' The whole place, except the area around the swamps and the Bog, seemed parched and unforgiving, all harsh light on weathered stones and dust. And yet, all its features seemed to cast shadows longer than they should have been. It was bright and gloomy all at once, like… like a very old, very eccentric attic with a lone window that has just been unshuttered to let sunlight in for the first time in decades."

He nodded, waiting for her to continue.

"The goblins, and the other creatures I met along the way were mostly small, all grotesque, and all a bit… funny. Cute, even."

That brought an acid glare that could have etched steel. Hastily, she amended. "Except yourself, of course."

He sniffed, muttering, "I should damned well hope not."

Sarah frowned, trying to picture him as he had appeared to her over the course of that adventure. "You were… very much like you are now, except – well, I remember more glitter." To that, he didn't deign to respond.

Describing her more recent forays came more easily. "In the dreams I've been having, it's very different. The landscape is a patchwork of lushness and severity, and all of it is beautiful in a way that looks like it would cut you if you tried to hold it. I hadn't run into very many goblins, except a very nasty pack of redcaps that reminded me of the Fieries… but now that I think of it, it's a bit like comparing a blue-painted werewolf to the Cookie Monster."

"…Cookie monster?" Jareth asked, a look of utter incredulity on his face. "Dare I ask what horror that might be?"

Sarah couldn't help giggling at that, gasping out, "It's a very fuzzy, cuddly character on a children's show that is a menace to cookies and well-meaning dentists." Jareth only shook his head bemusedly.

When she could breathe reasonably well again, Sarah finished, "At any rate, they really scared the crap out of me. I was frightened more than once on my first trip through, but… it wasn't the same. The redcaps in my dream felt worlds more deadly." She regarded him with curiosity. "So which one was closer to how it really is?"

He grinned, showing teeth, and shook his head. "You left me with an unanswered question; well and so, I will do the same. If you can answer that one for yourself, perhaps next time… I will show you, and you will better appreciate what you see."

_Next time._ Sarah was almost embarrassed at how unreservedly thrilling she found that phrase.

"You're leaving, then?" she asked, as neutrally as she could manage.

"I am. Dream your colorful – " He paused, with a wicked laugh. " – And naughty dreams, lovely Sarah, and I will return to see if you've found the answer, soon enough." He swept a graceful bow, his eyes gleaming with challenge and never straying from Sarah's own.

"I'm sure I will, then, and… it was good to see you." She was too proud to ask when the return visit would occur.

When Jareth smiled again, the expression shifted to a sardonic smirk as he took one light step sideways – and a gust came through her open window to fill the space he had very abruptly vacated. Sarah could have sworn she saw a swirl of glitter in the air.

* * *

Sarah lay down to attempt sleep as the first pale suggestions of dawn were visible outside, and only then did she recall another, rather important implication to something he had said.

" _Perhaps next time… I will show you."_

_After all that talk of permissions and what power my invitation tonight granted, he mentions a visit to the Labyrinth and I react like I've just been promised my very own bookstore._

_That bastard's_ good.


	7. Not Always What They Seem

Jareth's sidestep carried him into his throne room, which he found blessedly empty save for one gnarled hob of indeterminate gender who tended the crackling flames in the hearth. Orange light with the occasional flash of blue, green, or violet flickered warmly, but could not reach the shadowed chill of the room's corners. The little servant dropped an automatic bow toward its king's direction before returning to work, unalarmed by the sudden appearance.

In a movement born of long habit, Jareth glanced briefly at a wood-and-crystal contraption that grew out of the wall like some forest-bound coral, its arms, knobs, and counterweights twisted into a chaos that almost, _almost_ became pattern. A crystal knob suspended by a slender strand of glistening spidersilk scribed a ponderous, repeating arc beneath the device, and a faint click sounded just beyond the range of human hearing as one of the upper protrusions shifted a tiny increment. The Goblin King considered it intently, then nodded slightly, his features relaxing from the subtle tension they had held seconds before.

Turning on his heel, he strode purposefully out of the room through a side door. His booted footfalls were uncannily quiet against the polished flagstones.

The impossibly knotted staircase that led to the castle's highest tower reshaped itself in front of him, smoothing into a graceful spiral. Mere paces behind his passage, however, it resumed its confounding, tangled geometry. The high eyrie was a place that no subject of his, goblin or otherwise, ever entered.

Crisp, cool air greeted him as he stepped from the landing into the chamber; the arched, bare window framed an inky, star-strewn sky. The bright constellations hung innocently enough, but whenever the eye left them and then returned, they had changed – sometimes only shifting positions with each other like goblins jostling for territory, sometimes completely scrambling themselves into new groupings and images. Jareth's vision gave them little sport, as it was quickly trained on the labyrinthine shadows on the ground below.

No human, and few of his subjects would have noticed the pure white speck of a figure that he was watching intently as it approached through the outer layers of the maze.

* * *

The path marched austerely onward, the walls that flanked it standing straight and stiff-backed as soldiers. Every corner that led to a new branch of the maze was cut with knife-edge precision; no moss subverted these stones' integrity, and no tree roots roughened the smooth-packed dirt of the floor.

The lamps that lit Sarah's way were coldly glowing orbs atop regularly-spaced columns in the wall. They shone brightly, but the light felt hollow in the way of winter moonlight that only seems to accentuate the surrounding darkness. Harsh corners and angles of wall cast stark shreds of shadow across the path. The walls themselves were of sandy toned stone blocks, each hewn to a degree of precision that Sarah had not seen except in the concrete or brick of modern buildings. Only two sources of color broke the monotony. The first was an occasional rusty-looking stain on the stone, and the second was a very frayed, faded crimson thread that time and other feet had ground into the dirt. Though the thread had long gaps where it had rotted away, Sarah was sure that it had once been a single length.

_Someone walked this way before, and marked the path. I wonder if that person ever used it to get out again._

Sarah shuddered. This maze did not feel friendly.

Her misgivings were deepened in short order by a rank whiff of animal musk that reached her on a gust of a breeze, and flared into all-out alarm moments later at the sound of heavy, scraping footfalls just beyond the wall to her left. She wasn't alone, and she was quite sure that she did not want whatever company was nearby.

The footsteps began to fade, moving away from her, and she allowed herself a quiet sigh of relief. The relief proved extremely short-lived, as a hulking shadow stepped out of a side passage and into the path perhaps fifty yards ahead of her position. She could not see its shape clearly in the shadowed distance, but it stood at least eight feet tall on two legs and was covered in shaggy hair. Two large, curving horns grew out of its massive skull, cutting a sharp silhouette against the bright light of a globe-lamp behind it.

_Oh, no._ In the space of that instant, Sarah was struck by a flash of familiarity, and froze, transfixed by fright. Then the creature at the far end of her path roared, and broke the spell. Sarah turned and fled.

While she had intended to follow the path marked by the broken string back to… wherever she had started, it quickly became apparent that that was not an option. The thread-marked path was wide and mostly straight, as if it were the main thoroughfare through this strange domain, and the creature gained on her rapidly. Sarah knew that she would be risking dead ends if she struck out away from the wide path, but decided she didn't have much choice in the matter. At the next intersection, she darted around the corner to her right.

She ran for what seemed like hours, her heart pounding in her throat. Sometimes the smell and the sounds of pursuit would fade away, and she would slow down to rest, but they always returned to send her careening farther into the maze.

Finally, her luck with open paths ran out.

She had been running down a long corridor, looking for connecting paths, and finally reached an intersection. Turning right led her into a short dead end, so she wheeled around and sprinted down the opposite branch.

Into another dead end. She was trapped.

Her breath came in sobbing gasps, though she tried desperately to slow it – she knew the wheezing wasn't doing her stamina any favors. Finally remembering her experiences with apparent dead ends in the Labyrinth before, she shoved down her panic and walked forward toward the wall.

Solid stone blocks were all that greeted her, while behind, she could hear the creature approaching her intersection.

Time slowed to sticky spider webs around her, in the way of nightmares when the monster has caught up. Sarah knew her only hope of escape was to dodge past the creature.

She was terrified, but she would be ready.

Quickly, she flattened her back against the wall just behind the corner, praying that the creature would not immediately see her when it rounded the bend. In place not a moment too soon, she heard the scrape of its footsteps approach, and she tensed.

It cut the corner closely, leaving no room for a quick dart past it.

Sarah's escape route was blocked by a towering wall of rust colored fur.

Unbidden, a cry ripped itself from her throat as she moved to try to get around it anyway. The creature easily hooked her in one rock-solid arm, and the cry turned into a scream as she struggled against the blow that she was sure would soon fall.

No attack was forthcoming, however, and her flailing attempts to escape seemed to neither harm nor anger her captor.

"SAWAH!"

The shock as she looked up into Ludo's ugly, but eternally friendly face – not the fire-eyed maw of a minotaur – was enough to jolt her awake.

* * *

Sarah sat up, drenched in sweat, and rubbed at her temples. The cotton ball of pain between her ears soundly informed her that her body did not appreciate the deviation from her normal sleep schedule, and she groaned at the sight of her alarm clock. It was nearly three in the afternoon.

While Sarah was typically all in favor of sleeping in when she had the opportunity, she had definitely overdone it this time.

_I guess I'm allowed._ She sighed.

_At least I finished the manuscript, and – well, I don't think I would trade the rest of the night for anything else under the sun or stars._

A wry smile inched onto her face as she slid out of bed and went about getting clean and dressed. Any sense that her memories of the conversation with Jareth might not have been real was dispelled by the sight of the dream-sphere still nestled on a scarf on top of her desk – he _had_ come, in the flesh, to see her.

_And what pleasant flesh it was…_

She didn't even bother getting indignant at herself for that thought. Having spent nearly half her night in his presence, she knew she was as likely to succeed in mentally levitating herself as she was to drive those ideas about him from her mind.

When she had returned from the bathroom with damp hair and a clearer head, she found her neglected cell phone and braced herself for the inevitable.

" _Hey, you awake yet?"_

" _Sarah, seriously, you've either got your phone off or you're lazier than Jen is."_

" _OMFG WAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUP!"_

Sarah laughed and shook her head as she scrolled through the text messages. Apparently Laurel was even more caffeinated and impatient than usual today.

After filling the small coffeemaker from her carefully-hoarded stash of premium beans and setting it to brew, she called her best friend, who seemed to be taking exuberant advantage of the break before graduation.

"Oh wow, she lives!" Laurel's voice was full of teasing laughter, though fuzzy against the background noise of what sounded like a crowd. "What were YOU doing all night? I've been trying to catch you all freaking day."

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it, stifling giddy laughter.

" _Why, I was chatting with the King of the Goblins. Until dawn. In my bedroom."_ Sarah was mildly disturbed to realize that such a response probably wouldn't even faze Laurel.

Instead, she answered the other, more mundane but nearly as exciting half of the truth. "I was finishing my manuscript. I didn't go to bed until sunrise, but it's done."

"Oh, fantastic – I wanna read it! But not tonight. Jen and I and a few other people are going to go clubbing after dinner, and now that I know you're done with the novel…"

Sarah could almost hear her grinning.

"…I don't have an excuse," she finished for Laurel.

"Exactly! I was going to try to get you to come shopping with us this afternoon, but we're already out since you slept the day away. Want to meet us at Underhill Café around seven for food?"

Sarah brightened, both at the mention of her favorite restaurant, and the nutty aroma of coffee coming from the carafe. "Sounds great. I'll be there. I'm going to walk – do you guys have room for me in the car afterward?"

"Yep," Laurel answered cheerfully. "Might be a bit tight, but you can sit on my lap if nothing else – OW!" Sarah heard a muffled thump just prior to her friend's exclamation, then breathless giggling. "Apparently Jen has something to say about that… oh, excuse me, you can sit on HER lap… figures…" Sarah set the cup of coffee she had been pouring quickly to avoid spilling it, shaking with laughter.

"Or I could just drive my own car, and save you the squabble."

Another snort from Laurel. "No, no… we have room. Really. Theresa's driving her SUV, so there's plenty of space. We'll see you at the restaurant."

"Sure thing," Sarah said, still smiling as she hung up the phone.

Seven o'clock. That left her about three hours to herself, given time to change clothes and get over to the restaurant. A part of her wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon reading over the last few chapters of her novel, but she knew that they were really too fresh in her mind for it to be a good time to edit. Instead, she emailed the last segment to Dr. Casas, who had taken up the position as her sounding board for the story with a great deal of enthusiasm, and encouraged her on it throughout college. The young professor was busy, having several classes to teach and a book of her own in progress, but somehow she had always found at least the occasional stretch of time for Sarah's work. Sarah did not think she would ever quite be able to thank her enough.

Email sent and coffee inhaled, Sarah rose from her desk and stretched. The vivid memory of the previous night and the riddle Jareth had left her were a growing pressure in her mind, and she realized that she would be preoccupied throughout the evening if she didn't at least address it.

That left her one good option for how to spend the rest of her time before dinner, and she was out the door and headed for the library almost before she had even consciously made the decision to go there.

As a Mythology student, Sarah had sometimes felt that she would save a great deal of effort by just moving out of her dorm and into the library, she spent so much time there. As it was, a study nook in a forgotten corner of the third floor had been "hers" since sophomore year; no other students seemed to ever delve deeply enough into the stacks to find it, and a longstanding treaty with the library staff allowed her to leave books unshelved on the table there and expect to find them when she returned. Today, she wove through the narrow aisles between the towering shelves with purpose, pulling volumes as she went.

Reaching her corner table and depositing her armload of books, she looked back into the isles for a moment, chuckling quietly. The thick, musty walls of paper and binding glue caught the sound and absorbed it as completely as a fresh snowfall.

_I can't believe I never saw the resemblance before. It seems I'm always finding mazes to walk, no matter what I do._

Sarah settled herself comfortably in the dusty, upholstered chair, picked up the top book on her stack, and began to skim. She had a lot of literary ground to cover in three hours.

" _Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation."_

* * *

At six forty-five, Sarah walked out of her dorm room once again, having exchanged her t-shirt and hoodie for a flowing silk top, and her sneakers for her favorite pair of boots. Altogether, she decided she was dressed-up enough for an evening out, and her dark jeans would afford her enough freedom of movement to enjoy dancing when they hit the nightclub.

As she headed for the restaurant, she mentally reviewed what she had found in her afternoon's research. The trip to the library had been about as lucrative as she had expected, but not nearly as much as she had hoped. She had known where to find relevant books quickly because she had rooted through that particular body of texts many times before over the course of her schooling. Several of the volumes were almost old friends by this point – each maze-running dream, and not a few class projects had sent her back to that section of the library, looking to understand some new nuance of the mythos.

By this point, Sarah was fairly convinced that she had almost all of the information she was going to get on the subject of labyrinths, and no small amount of the surrounding lore of faeries, and the passages between worlds. It simply was not enough. She had the peevishly uneasy feeling that she really did know the answer, both to Jareth's challenge and a thousand others, but they somehow continued to dance just beyond her conscious grasp.

_Just as well that Laurel has managed to forcibly distract me for the night. I think I might go more than slightly batty, otherwise,_ she thought as she reached the restaurant.

The Underhill Café was a cheerful cubby of an establishment tucked into the basement of an office building on the edge of the downtown area, and Sarah had always loved it for both its whimsical atmosphere and eclectic menu. She smiled at the wash of savory smells that greeted her as she opened the door, and at Laurel waving from a corner booth.

Shoving the Labyrinth puzzle onto the backburner as best she could, Sarah joined her friends at the table.

* * *

Jareth was in his throne room when his visitor arrived, lounging in the round-armed chair with the deceptive ease of a sleeping lion. His customary mask of languid boredom settled firmly into place as a faint, tinkling chime announced her arrival.

The woman who entered was tall and willow-thin, and walked as though her slippered feet never actually touched the ground. From head to toe, she was bone white, as an artist's sketch in motion that languished on new canvas without ever knowing the touch of paint. Her fitted gown and tattered, voluminous overrobe nearly swept the flagstones, the shape of the latter evoking an image of tired wings dragging behind a great bird in a faded echo of past magnificence. Despite the wear of her garments, her face was as smooth and cold as carven ivory, at once young and terribly, terribly ancient without a spark of humor to say otherwise. Hair so white it made Jareth's own pale locks look like spun sunlight by comparison was piled impossibly high atop her head in an elaborate, braided coiffure, the ends of which were bound with feathers that dangled past her face to lie against her shoulders. Only two motes of color relieved the harsh snowscape of her presence: her piercing eyes were a lustrous shade of honey-gold.

Those eyes never lowered from the Goblin King's face as she stopped in the center of the chamber and inclined her head to him.

"I would express my scintillating delight at the honor of your visit, my lady, but by the gravity of your expression, I fear you do not bring glad news. Then again, you always look like that… but you always bring unpleasant news as well. So what is it that brings you to my backwater kingdom this night?" His apparent nonchalance was the flimsiest of veils over his amusement at baiting her, and the daggers in her glare said that she knew it.

The guest did not deign to chide him for his insolence, but her voice was the essence of frost when she answered. "I think you likely know something of the situation already. Even one so flippant as you could not help but feel it."

"That may be, but you didn't come all this way to tell me something I already knew."

"The last anchor has been dead six cycles," she said, bluntly. "Already, the border realms begin to drift."

His eyes flicked to the timekeeping contraption that sprouted from the wall, and he was quiet for several heartbeats. When his eyes did not return to her, the visitor spoke again.

"Am I next to hear that not even that concerns you, King of the Goblins?"

His mismatched gaze refocused. "Peace, lady. There is a candidate."


	8. A Crystal Moon

Beneath the castle, beneath each strand in the great knot of secret passageways that threaded their circuitous way under it, beneath even the deepest of the oubliettes, a single, arrow-straight tunnel stretched into what seemed like infinity. Its curving walls were not brick and mortar or flagstone; instead the tunnel was couched in solid bedrock, as if an enormous worm had burrowed through in some forgotten eon. The rock was laced with hairline cracks, a thin tracery of tributary veins around this great, silent artery. Impossibly, a faint light shone through them, illuminating the underground path with whispers of warm amber.

Somewhere, at the end of the tunnel, there was a lustrous wooden door that should have long rotted away beneath the earth. It was kept in perfect repair, however, its surface waxed and its brass handle and keyhole polished – unlike the chamber that lay beyond it.

The room at the end of the tunnel was large, almost cavernous, and at first glance, a human observer would have thought it was a quaint, old concert hall that had fallen into disuse and somewhat disrepair. Closer examination would tell a very different story. The only slightly threadbare-looking velvet curtain felt as ephemeral and oddly sticky as sheet of fine-spun cobweb. The dusty upholstery of the folding seats was hard not merely in the manner dry-rotted foam, but of cold, unyielding stone, and the stage itself showed patches of rock where warm wooden boards simply… disappeared. The entire chamber was reminiscent of a child in a very cheap costume at the end of Halloween – cardboard fairy wings drooping, and more glitter scattered on the ground than on the child.

Its glamour had been fading rapidly since the death of the chamber's occupant.

The human lay, sprawled and lifeless on the center of the stage next to a large harpsichord. He was dressed in a tattered, tailed waistcoat over knee-length breeches and moth-eaten hose. The clothing had once been very fine, a relic of a long-distant era of the mortal world, but the rich silk and wool and linen had degraded nearly to rags. His similarly ancient, powdered wig lay askew, revealing the last, snow-white wisps of the man's natural hair, and not an inch of his paper-thin skin was unmarked by wrinkles.

Still and colorless as a marble statue – save for diamond-hard, golden eyes – a woman dressed all in white from the feathers dangling from her hair to the tips of her leather shoes looked on, frowning. The human man's face had been a rictus of pain and frustration when she had last seen him alive, but had eased into a smooth, peaceful smile in death. He might have been sleeping, if not for the broken-doll angles of his neck and limbs against the fading almost-wood of the stage.

Gradually, the last lines of wood grain beneath him ebbed away, and he was no longer a musician collapsed on his stage – only a nameless body against a bare slab of bedrock.

The woman spoke quietly, as she turned for the door.

"Jareth, you insolent fool, you'd better bind her soon."

* * *

The street was abuzz with activity as Sarah and her friends made their way from a downtown parking deck toward the nightclub. Before they even reached the building, the faint pulse of the base was a near-tangible thing, felt in the soles of the feet and some primal corner of the mind that whispered _dance_. Despite her lingering preoccupation with Jareth's riddle, Sarah found herself enjoying the night immensely.

Laurel noticed her smiling, and elbowed her good-naturedly in the ribs. "See, you ARE looking forward to this. I knew it! You really ought to get out and party more, Sarah – you always seem to have fun when you do."

Laughing wryly, Sarah shook her head. "It's all the more fun for being rare, I think. I'll stick to being a bookish hermit on the day-to-day, thanks."

The group reached the short steps underneath the glowing "Inferno" sign, and Laurel stuck her tongue out at Sarah as she pulled open the smoked glass door. A blast of warm, slightly humid air rushed out to welcome them, redolent with the scents of alcohol, perfumes, and several hundred revelers, and the music throbbed in full force.

Jen spoke loudly in Sarah's ear as the women showed their IDs and paid the cover charge. "There's three levels – this one, an upstairs, and a basement. Different music in each room. We've all got our phones on us if needed, and if we split up we'll meet at the front at one o'clock." Sarah nodded, already planning to explore the upper and lower levels as soon as she could find the stairs. The hip-hop that was blaring on the ground level wasn't bad, but she had hopes for something more interesting.

"I want to see what else is playing before I pick a place to dance," she called to the others over the din of the club. She could just make out what looked like a staircase against the far wall. Theresa and her friend Eleanor were already melding with the crowd on the dance floor, but Jen heard Sarah and passed the message on to Laurel, who was a few steps ahead. Laurel threw a grin and a nod over her shoulder to Sarah, aiming for the stairs.

The trio wound their way through high tables scattered around the warm pool of light from the bar, managing to reach the stairs to the upper level without bumping into anyone carrying a drink. The steps were well-worn and somewhat steep, though glowing tread tape on the edges made navigating them fairly easy. A slight bend kept them from seeing the upper room directly, and through some trick of the architecture the music was also surprisingly contained. It was even more surprising when they rounded the bend and emerged on the top level to crashing salsa music and flamboyantly red lighting – the dark, curved staircase had made it impossible to guess what this section of the club was like until they had reached it.

_It's so different from the ground level it could almost be another world entirely,_ Sarah mused, then snorted. _Or, you know, another building._

Laurel shook her head, and both Jen and Sarah nodded in agreement, turning to descend back to the middle level. None of them cared for salsa, but the drastic difference between the two floors gave Sarah high hopes for the basement.

As they rounded a similar curve to reach the underground level, they were not disappointed. The bar glowed violet, and a brace of blacklights were trained on the wide dance floor. Complex electronic rhythms made Sarah's feet positively itch. This level was more sparsely-populated than the other two, which suited her just fine – the floor was open enough to move, but just full enough not to lose the anonymity of a crowd. It was perfect.

"Oh _hell_ yes!"

Sarah laughed at Laurel's enthusiastic exclamation, and couldn't help but agree.

"Shoulda brought glowsticks," Jen muttered as she followed Laurel to the dance floor with Sarah a half-step behind.

Stepping over the line between the scarred cement of the base flooring and onto the more forgiving black dance surface was like plunging into a pool. Sarah reeled unsteadily for a moment as the music was suddenly much, much louder than it had been on the periphery, realizing only slowly that the placement of the speakers kept the sound directed inward toward the dancers. Then the beat was in her head and coursing through her bloodstream, and she was moving.

She was vaguely aware of Laurel and Jen nearby, already caught in their own frenetic whirlpool of partnered motion. Beyond that, Sarah knew only sound and light and the convoluted maze of free space that wove between the other occupants of the floor. The music was familiar – some remix of a VNV Nation track that she was sure she had heard while on a techno kick a year or two previously – and her feet and hands and tossing hair all knew how to move, to dance, to _swim_ within it.

The song bled into another that she didn't recognize, but Sarah picked up its pattern almost without effort, twisting her way through knots of people so deftly they barely had time to notice she was there before she had wheeled away again. She smiled as she danced, relaxing in a way she had not managed in days.

_I wonder if any of the Labyrinth feels like this… it's a far cry from the ballroom dream, that's for sure_. The thought wandered across Sarah's consciousness just as the music began to change again, and she re-focused on learning and integrating herself into the new pattern.

The new song was strange, threaded through with a high, keening drone and a prickling of staccato notes that sounded almost like they came from a flute instead of a synthesizer. The underlying electronic beat pulsed dark and full, reverberating through Sarah's limbs as if to tell them how to match it. For the first time in quite a while, Sarah let her eyes linger on other dancers long enough to notice that the radioactive purple glow of the blacklights had shifted subtly, taking on a silver-blue radiance that was at once soft and faintly metallic.

The haze in the air blurred outlines, shrouding the edges of the dance floor in obscurity, and for a moment, Sarah felt that the floor was hers, and hers alone.

Then she felt something bump against her left side, and turned, embarrassed, to find another dancer there – and indeed, the floor was more crowded than it had been moments before.

"Oh! I'm sorry," she exclaimed. "I didn't see you."

The tall woman smiled mischievously down at her. " 'Tis no trouble," she assured Sarah before turning back toward her still-dancing companions with a swish of her coppery waterfall of hair. Her eyes had been a luminous and completely impossible shade of violet.

Sarah shook her head and began to dance again, sliding back into rhythm like a fish into water, this time careful to avoid colliding with the moonlight-limned figures that pressed in around her.

_Wait… moonlight?_

Faltering in the pattern of her steps, Sarah whipped her eyes upward. Sure enough, the club's ceiling, which had been dark, and crisscrossed with light bars, was gone. Instead, an open swath of star-strewn sky stretched above her into infinity, dominated by the cold brilliance of a crystalline moon. Faint in the haze ( _mist_ , she realized _)_ around the revelers, she could see the high, tangled hedge walls that ringed the clearing. The scent of dew-frosted foliage on the light breeze caressed her face.

She gasped as the jarring shock of realization ripped through her like a physical malady, and stumbled against the soft ground –

– which suddenly hardened into a black, smooth surface as she reached it. The club's dance floor. Sarah was disoriented and faintly nauseated, but she was sure of what she had seen.

She had somehow stepped back into the Labyrinth… wide awake.

The nausea passed quickly, and pure, unmitigated wonder filled its void.

_How did I_ do _that? Is it really so simple…? He didn't – I don't think he_ can _pull me through without my knowledge, so that must have been me._

"You alright?" Jen had seen her stagger to the floor, and was now standing beside her with a hand outstretched.

"Oh – oh, yes, thank you." Sarah smiled gratefully as she took the small hand to pull herself up. "I tripped, must've been over someone's untied shoelace or something. Nothing seems to be too much the worse for wear."

"Good, we need to get you home in one piece, don't we?" Jen winked before disappearing back into a clump of people.

Sarah nodded in absentminded agreement and let her feet synchronize with the music once more, already thinking furiously about how to replicate what she had done.

_I had been dancing my heart out, and thinking about the Labyrinth… it must have something to do with holding that idea in my head,_ she reasoned as she moved.

Sarah thought it unlikely that she could quite get back to the near-trance she had been in as she danced earlier, given how impatient she was to discover the secret; instead, she turned her mind directly to her impressions of the hedge-clearing where the fae were dancing.

_Mist._ She reached for the cool dampness that she had felt in the air, blocking out the pressing heat of the human building.

_Hedges and moonlight._ Her eyes falling half-closed, she mentally replaced the blacklight glow with the icier, more complex blue that had swathed the clearing.

_Leaves and loam._ She focused on the memory of the scents, and it was as if they were fresh in her nostrils once more.

Taking one last whirling step, she let her eyes fully open, again to the silver-blue shadows and lilting faerie music. She still felt slightly disoriented despite expecting – _hoping for_ – this scene, though it faded even more readily than had the last wave. Her elation at the success, however, had her heart fluttering as though to burst from her chest.

_I can do it on purpose! I wonder if I need to be anywhere specific. I wonder why it happened so slowly before. I… I wonder if_ he's _here._

Looking at the other dancers with new interest, Sarah began to see the discrepancies in their deceptively humanoid forms. The lady she had run into and her companions stood head and shoulders above Sarah, their rail-thin frames swaying with an almost ethereal grace; a masked man with obsidian skin pranced among a group of shorter, gnarled fae that reminded Sarah of the dwarves she had written into the story that the little human boy had dreamed; a diminutive, almost child-like female flitted through the crowd, her feet on the ground despite the diaphanous wings that sprouted through her gown.

And there – _there_ – a glimpse of wild, pale hair on squared, laughing shoulders had Sarah nearly tripping over her feet to change directions and follow that familiar creature.

She pressed past groups of fae, barely even noticing the faces and forms they wore now, whether beautiful or grotesque. It was frustratingly slow going to move through the crowd now that she was no longer following the demanding ebb and flow of the music, and he seemed to be moving away from her, but she hadn't lost him.

_Does he know I'm here? Is this the ballroom all over again, with him leading me along, or will he be surprised to see me?_

Finally, Sarah freed herself from a knot of exuberant sprites to find him standing just ahead, his back still to her as he spoke with one of the revelers.

"Jar – "

"Sarah?" Laurel's voice was faint, but somehow sounded like it was coming from right beside her. Sarah turned involuntarily to look for her friend, and saw nothing, though the mist that permeated the air grew suddenly thicker. She turned back to the Goblin King, who was spinning gracefully on one booted heel…

…Only to watch him fade from her sight into the mist. His eyes had widened in recognition just before he and all the fae dancers vanished.

Sarah blinked, the mist turning back into the faint ultraviolet haze of the Inferno dance floor, and became aware of an insistent hand on her shoulder. Laurel's. She was back in the club.

"Oh good, that is you! I thought I might have grabbed a stranger for a moment," Laurel was shouting over the music. She pulled Sarah aside, off the dance floor where she could speak a bit more normally. "Where WERE you, Sarah? You'd moved away from us early on, and then we figured we'd find you and see if you wanted to get something to drink, and we couldn't –"

Sarah shook her head, still disconcerted, and answered slowly. "I was just here, dancing. You… you must have missed me in the crowd."

Her best friend looked skeptical. "You didn't go upstairs or anything? You were here this whole time?"

"No, I never went upstairs. I'm so sorry if I worried you… what time is it?"

"About midnight. Theresa and Eleanor are probably still dancing their asses off, so let's grab Jen and get some drinks. You… look like you could use some water. You okay?" Laurel frowned, and Sarah found that she was indeed feeling the physical effects of dancing for nearly three hours – though she hadn't been the least bit tired before.

"Yeah, I'm fine, though water does sound great right now. I guess I got a bit caught up in the dancing," Sarah answered with a hint of a wry smile as they headed for the bar.

* * *

Much later, Sarah flopped heavily into her much-abused desk chair, exhausted but happy. The group of women had stayed at the club until last call at two, finally dropping Sarah off at her dorm room at nearly two-thirty. She had been tempted to sneak away from her friends for a while longer to try stepping back across the worlds, but didn't want to worry Laurel again if she ended up disappearing for too long.

_Given His Majesty's royal presence… who knows what might have happened_. Her practical acknowledgment of that potential… problem… was heavily seeded with bemused regret. _Ah well. He said there would be a "next time," and from the look on his face when he saw me, I'll wager that comes rather soon._ She chuckled softly to herself as she woke her computer up from standby mode.

Sarah scrolled through the new emails in her inbox, ignoring two "I'm graduating, who wants to buy my furniture?" list-serve messages, and some announcement of yet another new construction project on campus. Her eyes lit up with interest at the fourth message, though she was not terribly surprised to see it; Dr. Casas was always prompt with at least some comment on anything Sarah sent her.

She was, however, surprised and delighted at the subject matter.

" _Sarah, I haven't had time to start reading your last segment of manuscript yet, but I do have some good news for you. My friend at Bibliophile Monthly got back to me today, and he says that they will be offering the internships this year – both for website and hardcopy-published work. If you can make time Monday afternoon, I'll set up a lunch date and introduce you._

_Congratulations on finishing the draft of your novel, and on your upcoming graduation! Let me know about Monday._

_-Miranda Casas"_


	9. No One Can Blame You (For Walking Away)

Soft, yellow light diffused through the faintly musty air, casting illumination and shadows seemingly at random, for Sarah could not see a single lamp or witchlight. Everywhere around her, gilt lettering was struck to a vivid brilliance, the supple leather that it decorated catching the cast-off light in its own, more muted way. In its turn, richly polished wood reflected glints of gold from the treasures it supported, and even the flagstone floor carried a hint of sheen.

The walls, which twisted and meandered in a convoluted progression that by now Sarah found almost comfortingly familiar, were bookshelves.

Sarah's eyes wandered along the sweeping curves of lustrous oak and proud, straight book spines, awed. In clever harmony with the lines of the shelves, a network of wooden catwalks paralleled the higher reaches, even bridging across to one another. She suspected that it might be possible to traverse the whole expanse of this library – however large that might be – without touching a foot to the ground, if she could but find a staircase or ladder to climb to the lowest level.

Sarah found what she was looking for after rounding two bends: ladder rungs were cut into the oak on the edge of one shelf, leading up to one of the catwalks. She chuckled as she climbed, for there had certainly been no shortage of books within her reach from the floor. The soaring heights of these mammoth shelves had an allure all their own, powerful in its novelty, despite a brief glimpse of a generously upholstered leather easy chair on the floor several rows over.

The first row of spines she examined were lettered in a fluid alphabet that she did not recognize, but whenever Sarah stopped to focus on one in particular, the letters swam before her eyes to reconfigure into a form she understood. Nearby shelves held books in perhaps a dozen other languages, some recognizably human, and others… not. Though she could read them all, the titles were a fascinating, if jumbled mix.

_Kelpies. Le Mort d'Arthur. A Compendium of Hearth Spirits. The Kindly Stranger. Mythago Wood. Trods and Hallows. The Tale of Genji. Arianrhod. Under the Mountain. Is Man a Myth? Boudicca. The Summer Tree._

All of them seemed to have to do with stories and legends of the fae realms, but beyond that, she could see no order to the volumes. The authors, when authors were even listed, were as scattershot as the titles.

_How does one possibly find anything specific in this place?_ Sarah wondered.

She repeated her wondering aloud, but the sound was swallowed by the endless leather and pages as soon as it had left her lips.

It seemed that something had noticed her, however.

Mere moments later, she felt more than heard the displaced beats of air as a glossy-feathered hummingbird flitted out of some invisible cranny in a shelf, its brilliant green plumage reminiscent of emeralds. It landed on Sarah's shoulder as if such a perch was no less natural for it to choose than a tree branch, and let out a quiet chirp.

Sarah smiled, slightly startled, but delighted by the little creature. "Can you show me how to find things, then?" she asked it. It chirruped again and preened its feathers.

"I guess I'll take that as a yes," she muttered. "Do you know where to find… _Through the Looking Glass_?" It seemed worth a try.

The hummingbird immediately left her shoulder, a viridian blur as it flew along the catwalk. Sarah followed it around a curve and down a ramp, until it darted upward, directly at a shelf…

…and disappeared. Sarah could swear she had seen it fly _into_ the wall of books. Maybe there was a hole, or a tunnel of some sort? She peered more closely at the spot where the little creature had vanished.

She didn't find a hole, or any trace of the hummingbird, but when she allowed her eyes to focus on the gilded lettering of the book titles, she laughed. _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking Glass_ sat in front of her nose. Pulling _Through the Looking Glass_ from the shelf, she carefully opened the creaking leather cover to look for her favorite scene, but the words seemed to swim and fade before her eyes as sleep ebbed away.

* * *

Sarah awoke into predawn darkness. Before her eyes had even opened, she was aware of another presence in the room, one that thrummed with the watchful tension of a predator.

Marie wasn't due back for another four days.

Sarah heard no movement, and so could not pinpoint the intruder's location, but the fact of his presence was a visceral knowledge that had her every nerve on edge. Though her instincts screamed to jump up, make noise, and run – either to chase him out or escape – she willed herself to keep her breathing slow and steady as if she was still asleep. Her heart pounding, she cracked her eyelids open.

Moonlight through the window traced a dark, familiar silhouette as it perched lazily on the sill. That relaxed arrogance was unmistakable, even though the details of his form were obscured in shadow.

_Jareth_.

The lion's share of her fear loosened into relief, transitioning to irritation just as quickly. She had dared to hope he might have put his old habit of scaring the crap out of her completely behind him.

"Appearing in a sleeping woman's room unannounced, Jareth? Whatever happened to permissions?" The dregs of fear lent the tang of acid to her tone.

If he was surprised to hear her speak, he did not show it, only crossed elegant arms over his chest. While Sarah could not see his expression, she could hear the raised eyebrow in his voice. "Appearing at a fête in my kingdom unannounced, impetuous Sarah – never mind how you managed it in the first place – gives me some latitude in that regard. The inconvenience of the hour is just a little… _unfairness_ that I'm afraid you'll have to weather," he drawled, with sardonic emphasis on the last barb. "No difficult task for you, I'd imagine, given your experience in such matters."

Sarah blinked. She had definitely baited him, but the sharpness of his response was of a tenor that put her more in mind of their verbal duels years ago than of their careful conversation more recently.

_I threw him off balance, showing up in his world like that on Saturday,_ she realized. _He… he's trying to set the scales back to where they were._

_Hell if I'm going to let him do that -! …but if he thinks it worked at least a little bit…_

Smothering both her irritation and her growing amusement, Sarah did her best impression of being intimidated.

"I… I'm sorry," she said, drawing on the memory of her recent fright to inject a slight quaver into her voice. "I don't really know how it happened, that night – I had just been out dancing with some friends, and everything went misty, and then I was there." _Which is true enough – for the first jump, anyway._ _Except for the part about being sorry._

"Locational sympathy," he muttered. "Wouldn't be the first time a mortal had stumbled through…" Her answer seemed to satisfy him, at least for the moment. Relaxing slightly, she swung her legs over the edge of her bed and hopped down.

Closer to the window, she could see him better, and he was giving her a rather amused once-over.

_What the…_

She looked down.

It just _had_ to be the Care Bear pajamas tonight, didn't it?

Hoping her blush wouldn't show in the faint light, Sarah glared up at Jareth. He refrained from comment, but let out a silken chuckle at her discomfiture, which only irked her more.

She decided that she didn't quite have the equilibrium required for an extended conversation with the Goblin King in her childish, if adorable, nightclothes – and besides, she needed to at least splash some water on her face and try to wake up a bit more. "Well, since you're here and I'm awake, give me a moment – I'll be back."

He didn't quite smirk, but she could see the mockery in his eyes. "Running away, Sarah?"

She'd expected that, and responded with an eloquent shrug as she gathered up clean clothes and her hairbrush. "Inconvenient as it is, sometimes we mortals have to pee," she said with forced tranquility as she walked out the door toward the hall bathroom.

As quickly as she could, Sarah brushed her teeth, washed her face, and changed into jeans and a fitted tunic-shirt. The outfit was flattering but comfortable, and it seemed a reasonable balance between faded, years-old pajamas and something fancier that would definitely be trying too hard. As much as she hated to admit it, Sarah had always felt more at ease when she was presenting an image she had chosen – and that went triple for interactions with the Goblin King.

Five minutes later, she left the bathroom feeling considerably better. She returned to her room to find Jareth thumbing through a book with interest, the faint curve of a smile on his lips. He had not bothered to turn on the lamp, but a softly-glowing crystal hung suspended in the air, washing the room with cool, white illumination.

At a glance, Sarah identified the book as her much-loved copy of _Through the Looking Glass_ , which had been sitting on her dresser. He was looking at a colorfully-illustrated page, and as she drew closer, she could see the Bandersnatch in its swamp, like some deranged cross between a lion and a ruddy-plumaged bird. As she approached, he closed the book, handing it back to her.

"The source material that gives you your ideas never ceases to fascinate me."

Sarah could not quite tell if he meant that mockingly, and decided he may actually have been serious. The "you," however, had seemed a bit broader than a reference to her, specifically.

"Mortals, you mean," she clarified as she slid the book into place on her shelf. He nodded, watching her with mild interest.

_That's what it's really like! It's been staring me in the face this whole time._

"The Labyrinth is some… ideal of a trial, or journey, then. And it's every bit of what any human sees of it, and more. We bring our own imagery with us," she said, growing more confident with each word.

Jareth grinned, his eyes glittering in the witchlight. "Oh, good – I was wondering when you were going to see what was right in front of you."

She laughed, not really able to fault him for that jibe. "Yes, well, I'm just glad I _did_ see it. I'm terribly prone to overthinking things."

To her surprise, he snorted inelegantly at that. "And stating the obvious, even if you can't see it, apparently. I think you might be the only human I've ever seen who, when offered the chance to be lifted _out_ of the dank, dark hole into which she had fallen, chose to keep going _down_!"

" 'Things aren't always what they seem! Don't take anything for granted!' " she quoted exasperatedly. "How the hell was I supposed to know that only applies until you start trying to think out of the box?"

"You weren't supposed to know – that's precisely the point," he said, his grin growing wider, before darkening a shade. "And I wouldn't get too put-out, if I were you. That trick worked rather less often than I'd have liked."

"I just bet it did," she murmured, shaking her head. It seemed passing strange to be having this conversation with him without his usual touchiness over the issue of her victory, but all things considered, it was rather pleasant. "So… what about _you_?" she asked. "You seem a bit different from how you did back when I was younger, but not nearly so much as everything else in there." _What the hell, I'll push my luck_. "And what about the people I saw at the dance? Are they as subject to my preconceptions as the goblins?"

His face grew shuttered, smile fading. "How do you know they _aren't_ goblins, hmm?"

"I suppose I don't, but the question still stands." _Nice try, Your Majesty_.

The mismatched eyes narrowed to a knife-keen glare, but he answered. "The revel you stumbled into was within my kingdom, but it was not within the Labyrinth, as such. While the beings you encountered there are to varying degrees very fluid creatures in their own right, you saw them as truly as a mortal could have."

Still no mention of himself, but she knew better than to press that question, at least for now. She nodded, and after a moment of quiet, the pressure of his gaze eased once more.

"The last time I was here, I made you an offer, contingent upon answering the question about my Labyrinth," he reminded her in a voice swathed in velvet. "Will you accept it?"

_Careful._

"I'm sure you'll understand if I ask to hear you state that offer again?" she asked, smiling slightly.

Jareth laughed, low and richly. "Very well. That's astoundingly cautious, for you."

She nodded in acknowledgement. "Well, as you've noted a few times now, I am learning."

"So you are." He swept her a fluid bow, with only a hint of mockery. "My offer, lovely Sarah, is to convey you to my kingdom, and to give you a bit of a… tour, as it were, of parts of it. You will not be harmed by me or my subjects, and I will give you the means to return here when you choose to."

She raised an eyebrow at that, and he answered by lifting a whisper-thin, silver chain that was suddenly draped across his fingers as if it had been there all along. Before she could think to question him about it, his hands brushed around her neck and retreated, leaving the necklace twinkling around her throat. It had a single, tiny charm, a miniature version of one of his infernally omnipresent crystals.

"What is this supposed to – "

"Break the chain when you wish to come home." As she fingered it, he added quickly, "I assure you, it will not be difficult to do." She nodded, thoughtful.

It was far from free of potential traps, but the main issue – that she would be allowed to return when she decided – was covered adequately enough. If worse came to worse, the memory of her journey a few nights ago was an ace in her sleeve, for she was fairly certain that it had been more than "locational sympathy" that had allowed her to step between the worlds.

Of course, she wouldn't bet her freedom on that, but it was comforting, all the same.

"I accept, then – for the duration of this visit only," she said, trying not to giggle at the slight huff he let out upon hearing her addition.

Affecting a pained look, he took her hands into his gloved ones and let out a dramatic sigh. "You are so cruel, Sarah, to distrust me so." His slender fingers were warm around hers, sending a liquid jolt of awareness up her arms, whose every fine hair stood on end.

_This could take some getting used to._ She grinned inwardly. _A_ lot _of getting used to._

Jareth tugged her close enough that her elbows nearly brushed her chest, and she smelled spices and leather and the faint bite of ozone as the world spun around her.

Sarah refused to close her eyes, as tempting as it was, and soon enough the blur of colors re-solidified and gained coherent form again. Though she was still acutely aware of Jareth's nearness, the view of their surroundings took her breath away.

They stood on a smooth, stone balcony whose weathered crenellations stood low enough to afford a clear line of sight below, clearly more for decoration than for any defensive function. Above them soared still higher corniced towers of the same blue-grey limestone as the balcony. The landscape that spread beyond the castle was, as always, alien yet utterly familiar, a phantasmagorical patchwork of twisting walls and tunnels of trees. Watching it for several moments, Sarah was struck by the symmetry of this view to her first dream of the Underground during that awful first semester of college. Where then she had stood on a ridge on the outside, gazing across the convoluted expanse toward the castle in the center, now it was as if the dream had been mirrored. She almost felt like she might see her younger self standing there in the distance, if her eyes were many times sharper than their human limits allowed.

Jareth, for his part, seemed content to let her look in silence for the time being, though he remained standing just behind her and to the right, one of her hands still caught in his fingers.

"It's so beautiful, now, though it seems like it almost shouldn't be," Sarah said, softly.

"Many things are beautiful that shouldn't seem it," he murmured, alarmingly close to her ear. "I daresay you're… different, yourself."

_I know that's a compliment, but it could still mean about six dozen different things. Damnit._ Sarah shook her head in bemusement.

"Are the… specific trials I ran into still here in some form?" she asked, attempting to distract him – _well, both of us_ – with her curiosity.

"Oh yes," he answered, the taste of a smile in his voice. "Would you care to see one of them again?"

"As long as it's not an oubliette or the Cleaners," Sarah said wryly.

A laugh, and a rush of air, and the world had changed again. They stood at a crossroads, with high, regular walls of sandstone that put Sarah in mind of the strange dream where she had run from the "minotaur," and she looked around suspiciously.

"What is – " She closed her mouth as movement drew her attention. Two passageways stretched ahead, toward the castle in the distance, and they were each being blocked at once as the statues that had sat between them got up and languorously resettled themselves squarely in the center of each path. The creatures were a matched pair of sphinxes, and they regarded Sarah with quiet amusement in their curious, tawny eyes.

Jareth had drawn back a few paces, Sarah found as she instinctively checked behind her. She was mildly irked to find herself relieved by his presence, and quickly turned back to the sphinxes in front of her. Both were very plainly female, with curling, honey-gold manes of hair that almost matched the short fur on their catlike lower bodies, and both sat on their haunches in silence as if waiting for something.

"Are you the guardians of these doorways?" Sarah asked, as politely as she could.

The creature on the left laughed, a trilling, mellifluous sound, and looked to her companion. "She's a bright one, isn't she?"

The other one tossed her hair and stretched, looking bored. "Bright or dim, she's of little interest to me. We aren't allowed to eat her if she doesn't answer our riddle, so what's the point?"

"Kind of you," Sarah muttered, glancing back at Jareth, whose lips were twitching. "Then you ladies must have been the card guards before… right?" she guessed.

Both of them looked affronted. "We most certainly are not!" the first sphinx declared, indignant. "I'm Xeratiflamoria, and I'm quite sure I have never been – or seen! – such a vulgar thing as a 'card guard,' and neither has my sister, Yerascaltidryx."

Jareth spoke smoothly, almost soothingly, to the two creatures. "Our mortal friend here encountered a trial similar to, if much less deadly than your own, on her journey through here some human years ago. I'm sure she's most pleased to meet you."

Sarah swallowed her confusion and nodded. "I'm sorry to offend… I'm still figuring all this out, it seems," she apologized.

"Well, I should hope so!" Xera sniffed. The rest of her long and confusing name had already escaped Sarah's memory. Her sister, however, seemed to have revised her opinion of how interesting Sarah was, and beckoned the girl over.

Sarah hesitated, but stepped nearer when she recalled that they were specifically disbarred from eating her. The second sphinx – Yera? – gave Sarah a mischievous wink and whispered, "He's never given a mortal lady a tour before – or told us we couldn't eat one, come to think of it. I think you're _special_ , and you really should come back and chat sometime."

Sarah didn't know what to make of that, but her pulse had done a somersault at the emphasis. She wondered if all sphinxes were so prone to gossip.

Jareth cleared his throat, looking somewhat disgruntled at the feminine whispering, and Sarah decided that it was probably time to go. She smiled at Yera and Xera before turning back toward him, though the latter sphinx still seemed exceptionally miffed.

As her hand touched Jareth's, the now-familiar sensation of travel enveloped her.

* * *

Hours passed as he whisked her around the Labyrinth, revisiting sections she remembered as well as some that she'd never had the fortune – or, as it was, usually _mis_ fortune – to see on her previous visit. In most cases, Sarah could draw some connection between what she saw and her own mind, and the familiarity of areas she'd seen before shone strong even when their actual appearance had changed a great deal.

Jareth had been highly amused when she screwed up her courage to ask about the Bog of Eternal Stench, but to her slight surprise did not take the opportunity to dump her in it. Instead, he had conjured a crystal and shown her a dark lake where huge, sinuous shadows slid below the surface… which made her immensely grateful that he had not elected to take her there, assurance of safety or no. The only strange part of the journey (well, insofar as any part of the Labyrinth was _not_ strange) was when she had asked him if there was a library somewhere. His face had, for a moment, lost every bit of the warmth it had held for most of the night, and his eyes had gone flatly neutral as he replied that it was undergoing some modifications and perhaps he would show her another time.

Finally, when they stood on the stone observation balcony once more, Sarah voiced the question that had been tickling her mind since the very first time they had discussed changing points of view and ways of seeing.

"What do _you_ see, when you look out at it?"

A light, crisp breeze was tugging strands of his hair across his eyes as they narrowed slightly. "That's a rather… complicated question, and quite an audacious one to ask," he said, his voice low and carrying a slight edge.

Unintimidated, she replied, "That doesn't surprise me, but I really would like to know. If you don't want to tell me, you're as free as ever not to answer."

He stood in silence for several seconds before giving her a nod and a small smile. "I cannot tell you, but I can show you, though I fear it may be difficult to understand." He raised both hands, his fingertips cupping around her face, ten perfect points of leather-wrapped heat. "Close your eyes," he ordered softly, and she obeyed.

The darkness of her eyelids and the pressure of his fingers dissipated almost immediately, and even the stone under her feet seemed to fade away, leaving her floating in a nothingness that was slowly gaining form around her. At first, she saw bright lines as they spidered into being, like some liquid tracery of light. Each pulsed with a colorful luminescence as it twisted itself into the abstract suggestion of a wall, or tree, or archway – a living, morphing imprint of the object's very essence.

_This must be what magic looks like_.

The brilliant lines grew and multiplied, forming an intricate web in every direction that even in its seeming chaos conveyed an idea of form. _There_ was the thin spire of the castle's highest tower; _there_ was the brooding vortex of the place that had been Bog and Lake and Desert and a thousand more terrible things; _there_ the crossroad of riddles; _there_ the near-endless straight paths that formed the outer edges of the maze.

Gradually, the images began to coalesce. Each skeletal structure of magic was overlaid by a more complete picture – the _look_ of the place or object rather than simply its concept. The first image was overlaid by a second, and a third, and a fourth, and… and an infinity of layers, each a unique representation of the underlying form. Sarah found herself trying to blink away the images, even though her eyes were still closed, almost overwhelmed by the assault of stimuli.

_He sees what it is, and everything it could be… all at once._

Numbing complexity nonwithstanding, it was impossibly, unbearably beautiful – and a gift whose magnitude far surpassed any dream or whimsical inspiration Sarah had ever experienced.

Slowly, reluctantly, she opened her eyes. Jareth was looking down at her intently, some nameless question in the razor-sharp angles of his face.

Much later, she would ask herself what insanity moved her to do what she did. But at that instant, there seemed only one possible response to the wonder that filled her.

Sarah stretched upward on tiptoes, still feeling the light touch of his fingers on her cheeks, and threaded a hand of her own up to barely cup his steep jawline. The skin of his face was smooth – so smooth! – and it smoldered under her hand as if he carried a quiescent wildfire inside his body. His eyes widened in as much surprise as she had ever seen from him, but he did not resist her careful tug as she pulled his face downward and laid her lips against his.

The blood roared in Sarah's ears as she kissed him, building to a raging crescendo as she tentatively flicked her tongue against his lower lip and found it met by Jareth's. The kiss deepened with a spiraling suddenness that stole her breath away, and one of his hands slid behind her head to cup it and press her closer. His mouth was silken and hard and pliant and demanding, and a dozen other contradictory things all at once, and his tongue tasted of autumn spices and lightning. Sarah's senses reeled under an onslaught greater even than the magical vision had been as the moment stretched and dilated around them, their locked mouths the epicenter of the maelstrom.

After what seemed at once an eternity and no time at all, the kiss slowed. Sarah opened her eyes, hesitant, and saw Jareth's own strange eyes alight with the same flame she had imagined lived in his body, flickering with an inscrutable heat as he watched her.

It was too much – she felt as if she would never be able to let go, but she had to –

" _I assure you, it will not be difficult to do."_

_Well that was a damned, bloody lie, but I'll try not to hold it against him._

Sarah's left hand fumbled at her throat to find the silvery chain of the necklace…

…and snapped it.


	10. The Babe with the Power

The wind from Sarah's sudden departure tugged at his hair, and the gossamer strands flicked out plaintively as if to try to follow her. He took a single, deep breath and caught himself with one elegant hand on a limestone merlon. Had the slim, articulate fingers not been covered by a glove, the knuckles would have been white.

Minutes, or perhaps hours slipped by as the Goblin King stood against the parapets, his eyes inscrutable and wild. A breeze that carried crisp notes of autumn had picked up in earnest, swirling in light gusts and eddies around the craggy lines of the castle and continuing to play havoc with his hair, though he could have been carved from stone himself, for all he seemed to notice.

Finally, fluidly, his stillness broke, and a slow, open-lipped smile spread across his face. He turned on his heel and strode into the door that had just appeared in the castle wall, sharp eyes and teeth flashing as twilight descended.

* * *

"Damnit, Sarah, why couldn't you have learned from my mistake and gotten a first floor – AACK!"

Muffled thumps sounded up from the stairwell, and Sarah looked back from where she was unlocking the door to her new apartment. A flushed and somewhat sheepish Laurel was – fortunately – still holding the heavy box of books she was carrying, but the cushions she had insisted on stacking on top of it and holding in place with her chin were now scattered in disarray all the way down to the previous landing.

Sarah snorted a laugh. "I thought you said that load would be a 'piece of cake,' and _now_ you're complaining about the stairs?" She opened the door, ushering Laurel in with the box, and headed back to collect the unfortunate cushions. "Besides, I'm only on the third floor – this should be all kinds of easy for you, Miss 'I have three hours to move all my crap into a fourth-floor studio at the top of a stairwell so narrow it barely meets building code,'" she called up through the open door as she gathered pillows.

Laurel set down the box flexing her fingers in relief, and groaned at the thought of the half-carload still waiting for them. Sarah came in the door with the cushions, still looking tremendously amused. "I think you have, like, nine thousand books, though," Laurel muttered, though she was grinning too as she poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher in the refrigerator.

"Mmhmm," Sarah agreed serenely. "None of them are going to suddenly start vibrating if you shift the box the wrong way while you're trying to get up the stairs, though, are they?" She arched a dark eyebrow, and Laurel nearly choked on her water, flushing pink.

"I TOLD you, that was my ALARM CLOCK!"

"Uh huh. Right. I'm sure it was," Sarah teased. "Let's go, I bet we can finish this in another two or three trips, and it looks like it's going to start raining any minute."

Her best friend let out a martyred sigh and put the water down. "Yes, your Majesty, I'm coming…"

"Hey, the end's in sight. Jen's getting off work soon, right?"

"Yeah, at five."

"Call her, and we can snag her from work and hit the pub for dinner afterward, if you want. I think I owe you a drink, and I know I need one." Sarah headed down the stairs back to her car, Laurel clomping loudly behind her.

"Hah, I bet! Are you nervous about tomorrow?"

"A bit, yes, to be honest. I mean, it's not like I haven't been working for pay at all these last four years, but Dr. Casas apparently really talked me up to the editor-in-chief, so I feel like I've got a lot to live up to." Reaching the car, she handed Laurel a box – clothes, this time – and picked up another small case of books for herself.

"Any more pillows?" Laurel asked cheerfully, making Sarah laugh again. "But seriously, I understand where you're coming from. Just remember, though, Dr. Casas just got you the interview. You must've still impressed him pretty well if he hired you on the spot! What did you say, anyway?"

"I brought a couple of short writing samples to the interview, and he really liked those." She paused, catching her breath as she reached the landing in front of her apartment. "I think it also helped that I could quote half the authors he mentioned… so, you know, my 'nine thousand' books come in handy, sometimes," she finished wryly.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it. You want to be a writer, you lug around half the bloody library along with you everywhere you go or you lose your literature nerd cred, I know. You'll kick ass tomorrow, Sarah, and you know it. I'm pretty sure there's no one on this planet more qualified than you are to work on that magazine." She gave her friend a sly grin. "So what did your dad say when you got a Real Job nailed down even before graduation? Did you call him right away?"

Sarah giggled. "No, I didn't…"

"Well, you should have!"

"I waited until they came up for graduation and told them all then. Figured it would be a nice reverse-graduation gift, and it was. He had this hilariously surprised look for about three seconds, and then was all 'well I'll be damned' and congratulated me."

"Your brother was really cute, running around all over the place like that." They were walking wearily down the stairs again for the final load from the car.

"Hah, I thought Karen was going to keel over trying to keep up with him! He's been growing so _fast_ , or it seems like it since I only see him a few times a year. And I couldn't believe it when I went home last Christmas and his hair had turned brown. I mean, I know that happens to a lot of kids who are blonde when they're little, but since I wasn't around to see it change gradually, I really did a double-take."

"Oh yeah, that happened to my older sister. Mine stayed – crap, I think the rain's starting, you called that one!" They took the last few stairs two at a time, scurrying to grab the last few boxes from the car, which were thankfully light enough to move quickly. The bottom dropped out when they were halfway up the steps again, and Sarah was grateful that at least the stairwell was covered.

Reaching her new apartment, they dropped their burdens on the depressingly high pile of boxes – _how did I ever fit this much crap in my dorm room?_ – and flopped down onto the nearest accommodating surfaces, Laurel on a kitchen chair and Sarah on her small, secondhand couch.

Both women were content to catch their breath for a few minutes; then Sarah looked up questioningly. "Food?"

"Food and a beer," Laurel agreed. "Let's go get Jen."

* * *

Sarah was awake before the sun rose, and for once, before her alarm went off as well. Restless and excited, she had woken up several times over the course of the night, and finally decided to just go ahead and get out of bed at six. She showered and dressed quickly, then took her time with coffee and breakfast in front of her computer, which she had set up on the one open corner of her kitchen table. Her desk was buried under boxes of books, and it wasn't likely to be cleared for at least another day.

It had become Sarah's morning (or midmorning, or afternoon, or whenever she woke up) habit to write down a list of at least a couple of new ideas for her stories; it was something that Dr. Casas had suggested at the very beginning of her freshman year writing class, and that had stuck with her ever since. She found that some of her most interesting, out-of-the-box characters and situations came out of the exercise, and generally attributed it to the fact that it took her at _least_ two cups of coffee to fully wake up, most mornings.

This particular morning, she was rather more distracted than usual, and it was a struggle to relax enough not to censor what she put down. Difficulties nonwithstanding, though, she had a short list saved in her journal file by the time she had to get ready to leave.

Anxious to begin the day, she twisted her long hair into a knot to keep it out of the way and packed her laptop, a notepad, and a lunch in her shoulder bag. She was headed for her door when she paused, lips pursed, considering.

_Ahh… why the hell not. For luck._

Coming to a decision, she quickly returned to her bedroom to dig through the pile of as-yet unorganized trinkets to find her jewelry box.

She opened the box, and her heart raced for a few seconds when she could not see what she was looking for.

_I haven't taken it out since, it must be here… unless…_

Pulling out a folded drawing from Toby, she breathed a sigh of relief. The tiny, unobtrusive bit of silver and crystal had fallen down between the leaves of paper. Its chain was still broken, though she'd had half a mind to take it to a jeweler for mending – she'd decided that keeping it was all well and good, but wearing the thing in public display might have ramifications more dire than mere sentiment.

Smiling to herself, Sarah slipped the necklace Jareth had given her into her deepest pocket, and left for her first day at the internship.

* * *

A searing seam of lightning rent the pitch-black sky, for the space of an instant illuminating driving silver rain and the slate-grey, glistening rooftops below.

A heartbeat later, the thunder boomed sonorously in its wake, the whole world below its echo board. Sarah could feel the shockwave of it reverberate through the air around her as it sent a shiver of vibration through every one of her soaked feathers.

_Wait… FEATHERS?_

As the realization dawned that not only was she out in a violent thunderstorm, she was a _bird_ , wheeling above what looked to be some quaint – if brooding – town, with nothing between her and wet cobbles but a few hundred feet of empty air and rain, her wings faltered, and she tumbled ungracefully a dozen yards before catching herself again.

_If I was going to be a bird, why, oh why did it have to be in a storm? This would almost be fun, otherwise… even though if my mind came up with_ this _place,_ _I must not know it as well as I thought…_

_That first week of work was something new, but I don't think it messed with my head this much!_

She skimmed closer to the roofs, which actually did seem to be made of dark shale, looking for likely shelter. A nagging feeling tugged at her instincts, that she ought to be going somewhere specific, but the immediate desire to get out of the rain trumped that concern for the moment.

A particularly well-appointed house – more of a gothic mansion, really, she saw as she approached – had a hunched, towering gargoyle on the corner of its peaked roof, and she flapped soggily toward it. Perhaps its stooped head would offer enough of a respite for her to get her bearings.

Maneuvering the landing was more difficult than expected, but she managed to situate herself on the clawed stone feet, and its glowering skull did indeed keep most of the rain off her. Sarah shook every muscle in her tiny body faster than she would have thought possible, and sprayed water everywhere as her sodden feathers released what must have been a quarter of her own weight in rain.

Then she nearly fell from her perch in fright as the rumbling sound she had assumed to be more thunder resolved into a grating, gravelly voice that came from just above her.

"You're a brave one, little nightingale, to be out in a storm such as this, and braver still to sit upon my claws – or is it just foolish, I wonder?" Two faintly glowing red eyes peered down at her from a leering head that was very much _not_ inanimate stone.

_I'm terribly sorry – please excuse –_ Sarah tried to speak, and halted halfway through when she realized her words were coming out only as trilling birdsong.

The gargoyle seemed to accept it well enough, however, as it rumbled a reply. "Bahhh… foolish, perhaps, but you amuse me, little one, and I ate a thief only yesterday. You may live, for tonight."

_Erm, thank you. Very much. That's very kind of you,_ she chirped nervously.

It let out a laugh like boulders settling. "A two-legs approaches ahead, a slave to neither moon nor blood. He is perhaps as foolish as you, but you may follow him below if you would get out of the rain." The jutting chin indicated the narrow street that stretched before them, and indeed, a dark, humanoid figure was hurrying along it.

The figure drew nearer, and Sarah twittered a bird-like laugh. The human was an adolescent boy, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, and he wore the flapping, ankle-length duster, foppish shirt, and spiked accessories and piercings of nearly every brooding mall goth she had seen in high school. As she watched him, the tugging feeling she had felt earlier snapped into focus – the street, the buildings, even the rain in the boy's near proximity seemed deeper and more detailed than the surroundings still farther away.

He was the epicenter of this dream world, which meant that somehow, she had trespassed into it.

_Just when I think things can't get any weirder… well. Wow. Might as well follow him and see what's what, I suppose…_

Chirping another thank-you to the indulgent gargoyle, Sarah braced herself to get soaked again and fluttered clumsily down to the street as the boy passed under the eaves. He was walking down stone stairs set into the ground to a basement entrance that Sarah could have sworn had not been there before his arrival.

With a mental shrug, she followed him as the door opened, into a space filled with cool shadows, dimly ruddy lights, and strange perfumes.

For a moment, a wave of nausea overcame Sarah, and she faltered and fell to the floor as the world seem to stretch and bulge around her. She squeezed her eyes shut and bit back an outcry of alarm, only opening them when her head had stopped spinning. When she did, the antechamber she was in felt a great deal smaller, and the hands splayed before her on the lush rug were her own pale, human ones.

The delicate hand that reached down to help her up, however, was dusted with fine, sandy fur, and its fingers tipped with the suggestion of sheathed claws. Sarah blinked dumbly at it for several seconds before taking it gingerly and pulling herself off the floor. She found herself confronted by a pair of door guards, their upright and relatively normal female forms in strange contrast to their very feline skin and eyes.

The guard who had helped Sarah up shook back her mass of tawny curls and winked in an amusingly familiar gesture, before giving her a light push into the room beyond. Sarah stumbled ahead, and turned back to thank the woman, the sphinx's name rising unbidden to the tip of her tongue, but the entryway was already shrouded it total shadow, and she could not pick out the forms of the door guards any longer.

The main chamber was a maze of tables and opulently stuffed chairs, low walls and semi-private nooks where knots or pairs of... people… gathered in murmured conversation, some holding crystal glasses of dark wine, and others, the long stems of water pipes. Quiet, mournful music melded with the haze of smoke and perfumed incense, only occasionally punctuated by smooth, cultured laughter or a soft moan from the deep shadows of the nooks. At a casual glance, most of the beings could have passed for human, but closer inspection revealed blood-red irises, or flashing fangs, or occasionally some animal feature like those of the door guards. Most paid no mind to Sarah, but as she passed near a table, sometimes one or two would give her an appraising, disturbingly _hungry_ look that made her skin crawl.

_Vampires and were-creatures. It figures…_ Sarah could have giggled if she had been less nervous about drawing attention to herself in this place.

The brisk movement of a black coat caught her eye, then disappeared, and she realized that she had seen the dreamer's reflection briefly in a narrow floor-to-ceiling mirror set in one of the walls. Weaving between tables, Sarah did her best to follow him, finally picking out the bright red, spiked hair of the actual human rather than his reflection across the room.

As Sarah passed before the mirror herself, she almost did not recognize the woman she saw. She wore a tight-bodiced (and _rather_ low-cut) gown in emerald green, with a full skirt that fell from her hips in a riot of green and nut-brown tatters. Her arms were left bare, but at her elbows began a twisted, barbed pattern of vines and thorns in dark green ink that traveled all the way up her shoulders, and sent two tendrils up either side of her slim neck to collect in whorls around her eyes. Her eyebrows had been replaced by finely speckled, brown feathers, and the whole effect was that of a very elaborate, thin-molded mask.

From around her throat shone a faint glimmer of silver, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw the necklace she wore. It was Jareth's tiny crystal.

With effort, Sarah tore herself away from contemplating the meaning of her strange attire, as the boy she followed had ducked into a low doorway not far ahead. Hurrying after him, she stopped short when she saw him standing at the other end of a brief hallway, just before it widened into another glowingly crimson chamber.

He must have heard some rustle from her clothing, or scrape of her slippered foot against the floor, for he whipped around and stared straight at her. Alarmed that she could apparently be noticed by more than just the denizens of this dreamscape, she froze in place, as astonished as the boy seemed to be. His wide eyes were an ordinary shade of blue set in a face halfway between youthful roundness and an adult man's angles, and the first faint dustings of dark facial hair barely blurred the line of his chin. No one she knew – he could have been any gawky teenage boy struggling to be different.

"I… didn't think I'd see another human here..." He paused, swallowing audibly. "Are you… are you a sorceress?"

Sarah did not know what to make of that.

Her stunned silence must have been taken for some sort of mysterious displeasure, for he stammered on, looking even more nervous. "Um, I'm sorry – I know I shouldn't say that out loud, but I thought – well…" His voice cracked, and fell silent.

_Well, if I look the part… I suppose Jen would be proud of me for this,_ Sarah thought, wryly, as she gathered her wits and answered.

"What brings you here, human?" she asked, her words coming out more haughtily than she intended.

"I… I needed to ask a boon of the Lord Strahd Bloodraven, but now that I've gotten here, I'm afraid to go in." His eyes flicked back toward the garishly-lit room. "Maybe, could you, y'know… give me some kind of protection?"

Sarah closed her eyes for a half-second so she wouldn't roll them – surely she'd had more imagination with names when she was his age. _What am I, Glinda the Good? I'm not in pink and floating around on a bubble, so what makes him think I'm not going to turn him into a newt or something equally cliché?_ It was only through supreme effort that Sarah continued to keep her regal composure at that line of thinking. It probably wouldn't do to burst out laughing; he was confused and frightened enough as it was.

She sighed inwardly instead. _Maybe that's what I should be, then, I suppose. Playing faerie godmother in someone else's storybook… except it's not all his, is it? He's touching the Labyrinth, I know it. Yera recognized me!_

She finally inclined her head to him and answered aloud. "I will grant you my protection for the next hour, whatever that may mean in this place. Come here."

The boy obediently walked over to her, his rawboned adolescent height already putting him half a head above Sarah, but he was docile enough as she stood on tiptoes to place a light kiss on his forehead. The imprint of her lips glistened against his skin for a moment as if she had been wearing gloss, then faded away to nothing before she could contemplate the matter further.

_That should bolster his confidence, if nothing else, and that's probably what matters the most, here,_ she mused as the boy bowed awkwardly to her.

"Thank you, lady," he said, his voice cracking again. He was definitely no older than sixteen.

"Go, and finish your errand. Perhaps next time, it would be wise to seek protection _before_ walking into a vampire den, hmm?" she suggested, playing her role to the hilt.

"I… yes, your – yes ma'am. I'll remember that. Thanks again!" Squaring his still-narrow shoulders and turning up the high collar of his coat, he took a deep breath and strode into the room beyond. Sarah watched him move into the pool of light and make another, slightly more graceful bow in front of a wide table, to someone out of her line of sight. She turned back to the entrance of the hallway, the main room a murky blur beyond it as she walked back…

… into morning sunlight through the bedroom window in her new apartment.

* * *

Saturday night found Sarah lounging in her finally-organized living room with a mug of coffee and her laptop, idly toying with the broken necklace as she contemplated her boss's request with glee.

It seemed they had a shortage of original stories in the lineup for the issues two and three months out, and the editor-in-chief had been every bit as impressed with Sarah's writing as he had originally seemed. Much to her surprised delight, he had asked if she would be willing to write a short story to be serialized over two issues of the print version of the publication.

For all a goodly amount of her work had seen the public eye by this point, she was more than a little anxious about making this one as perfect as it could be. The basis for it was taking shape in her mind, though, and a contented smile had been spread across her face for a full half-hour of outlining and note-writing. She would combine one of her idea snippets from Monday morning with elements of the dream she had somehow – she still wasn't sure how – stumbled into, and tell a tale of children passing word of another realm among each other.

She wasn't sure of the details, but she thought it was high time a certain faerie tale monarch made at least a cameo in her writing.


	11. Such a Fool Heart

 

The muted, violet tones of June twilight were just replacing the last streaks of sunset orange in the sky as Sarah left the restaurant to start the short walk home. Miranda – it still felt strange to think of her so, but she had been quite adamant that “Dr. Casas” was far too formal now that Sarah was no longer a student – had met her there for dinner after work to discuss final edits to the novel that Sarah would complete before beginning the process of submitting it to publishing houses. One of the senior magazine staff was also a publishing agent, and she had recently agreed to take Sarah on as a client. Though she knew there was likely still a long road to walk before the book would see store shelves, Sarah had had to struggle to contain her excitement through dinner and remember to eat in addition to talking.

On her way back to her apartment, sheaf of notes in arm, her thoughts meandered through her stories even as some more present part of her reveled in the cool evening air on her skin and the fading smells of sun-warmed trees and pavement. For the brief moments when she could block out the feel of hard cement beneath her feet and the droning urban soundscape, she could almost think of herself as being on those wilder paths, though she sorely missed the transient glow of the fireflies that had always been an exuberant presence in her parents’ suburban yard.

Perhaps she caught a glimpse of snowy wings through the decorative tree branches, or perhaps it was simply inevitable that her mind would drift to the place… person… it eventually did. Regardless, Sarah found herself thinking about Jareth.

He had been a mirage in the peripheral vision of her mind’s eye for weeks, the impression of a presence only half-sensed, yet almost always there. She had been able to avoid losing herself in daydreams – or at least, avoid doing so more than usual – only because her work at the magazine was fast-paced and challenging. Attempting not to replay their last encounter over and over in the three days that followed it had proven utterly futile, and even after nearly a month the encounter remained a popular topic of mental discourse in her sleep.

Sometimes, she bemoaned her loss of objectivity. Sometimes she wondered whether the kiss had affected him as much as it had seemed to, and if so, whether she could use that to her advantage in the future.

Mostly, though, she just wanted to touch him again.

What little remained of her initial wariness for the Goblin King had found no concrete grounds for distrust; he had played the role of the arrogant faerie lord to the hilt, but when all was said and done, he had yet to try to coerce her into anything. He had been courteous, even generous in many respects, and truly seemed to appreciate her wonder and curiosity about his world. (Part of Sarah would have dearly loved to amend that to “appreciate _her_ ,” but she was trying not to get too ahead of herself.) If he was playing her for some reason, she didn’t see how.

At times, she wondered about his claims of boredom driving him to her presence, and just to what degree a desire for novelty could be a motivation for a being such as Jareth. He seemed at once both calculating and wantonly capricious, the former belying the idea and the latter supporting it, and she realized that she could not say with certainty which was the truer interpretation. Her writing’s positive influence on the connection between the human world and the Fae was another possible reason for his visits, but in purely pragmatic terms he needn’t bother visiting her directly to encourage it.

Which seemed to leave the utterly wonderful (and slightly frightening) conclusion that she, specifically, was important to him.

Amused and a bit exasperated, Sarah blew dark strands of hair out of her eyes as she slipped through the pedestrian gate of her apartment building.

 _I tried not to care. I didn’t want to care. He’s alien and dangerous (…and wild and clever and beautiful and exciting and…), and I was right to be suspicious. Should still_ be _suspicious_.

She sighed.

_Alright Sarah, what’s it going to be? Are you going to go looking for him? Ask him to come to you? Or just wait for him to pop up again in the middle of some night when he damn well feels like it?_

Pondering her choices as she absently climbed the stairs to her door, she was startled out of her reverie by a short pulse of light that winked in and out of existence in the corner of her eye. She stopped, hand on the doorknob, and waited with eyes straining into the deepening dusk beyond the stairwell.

_Was that…?_

Minutes passed, and no firefly glow shone again; Sarah shrugged and walked inside.

 

……

The decision of how her next encounter with Jareth would be initiated was taken out of her hands no more than fifteen minutes later, when she heard a muffled, fluttering thump against her window. For a moment, she stared confusedly at the white owl as it – _he_ – was plainly demanding her attention; _why didn’t he just sidestep in like before?_

But the answer came quickly enough, and she moved to open the window.

 _Permissions_. On his previous visit, her own trespass had allowed him entrance, and before that, she had verbally invited him. In the present case, the best he could do (at least, in her own home) was to communicate that he wanted her to talk to him.

The realization that she could, in fact, refuse to let him in was a brief amusement, but the notion was gone almost as soon as it surfaced. If she was going to blatantly antagonize the Goblin King’s pride, there were far better reasons to do it than for a petty lark, and besides – she had dearly wanted to see him, anyway.

Sarah flipped the latch on the window and stood aside as the great bird winged into the middle of her living room. He did not land and then transform, but rather seemed to stretch and grow into his humanoid shape as he slowed. The light around him _twisted_ – that was the best way Sarah could think to describe it – and suddenly Jareth was there on two legs, his mane of pale hair floating around him as he turned to face her –

– and the next thing she knew, her back was pressed against the cool glass of the still-closed side of the window, her left hand caught in an wrought steel grip and slammed beside her head as his mouth claimed her own in a sudden and ferocious assault.

The first kiss had been heady and deep and almost challenging, but this… this threatened to sweep Sarah away. She had no chance to adjust, or to rise to meet him; his tongue and teeth and silken lips were simply _there_ , moving in hungry concert as if to devour her. The heat of his body was an inferno, where before it had been only embers.

His free arm wrapped roughly around her waist to fasten on her left hip and yank her forward against his chest. Every muscle in his spare frame was as tense as she felt, taut with a fury only half-restrained as he dragged his fingers from her hip, up her ribcage in a broad caress that caught the hem of her shirt and bared sensitive skin to the buttery softness of his leather glove.

Sarah let out a choked whimper into his mouth, and even through the bruising intensity of the kiss she could feel his triumphant smile.

As suddenly as he had pinned her, he melted away again, all contact vanishing nearly at once save for a feather-light, trailing stroke of his right hand along her jaw as he stepped backward with the twist of a satisfied smirk on his lips. Sarah was left gasping for air, slumped slightly against the half-open window.

“What… what was _that_ for?” she finally managed through gritted teeth. Her entire body felt like an over-wound spring, still screaming for more even as she internally cursed his smugness.

“That was for the _exquisitely_ abrupt timing of your departure from our last meeting, my lovely, _infuriating_ Sarah,” he answered mildly. His voice held its usual note of light mockery , but Sarah was gratified to see that he looked at least a bit out of breath, himself.

Shakily, she raked dark hair over one shoulder, its blanketing weight far too warm for comfort against the flushed skin of her neck. “I see,” she mused, struggling to wrestle her hormones back under control. “You couldn’t stand not having the last word, could you?”

“Of course not. Could you?” Sarah grudgingly shook her head, and he continued. “While I assure you your stubbornness will never eclipse my own, it is formidable enough for a human to be… amusing.” He gave her a sharp grin more akin to bared teeth than any gentler expression. “Besides, what is that expression humans are so fond of…? Turnabout is _fair_ play, after all.”

 _I’m never going to live that one down, am I?_ she thought with an internal moan of chagrin.

“What’s the matter? You did so love to tell me how unfair I was, once,” he taunted. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me reformed.”

 _Bastard!_ “Stop reading my mind!” The words came out unbidden, and far closer to a plaintive yelp than she would have liked.

“Stop painting your thoughts all over your pretty face, then. Though I’d of course prefer you continued.”

Sarah allowed herself a very brief moment in which to imagine his Majesty the Goblin King strung up by his naked ankles and dangled over a chicken roost…

…which turned _far_ too quickly into an image of Jareth lounging in similar dishabille on a featherbed instead, and she quickly quenched the scene with a mental bucket of ice water.

_Got to calm down. He won the play, but will only take the match if I keep letting him._

She straightened her shoulders and raised her eyes, willing her expression to one of amusement rather than defiance. “Alright,” she said, simply. She was rewarded with a single, owlish blink before he gave her another half-grin with only slightly fewer teeth showing than before. (Teeth that had felt so very wonderful on her lower lip not three minutes earli – _STOP._ )

“Well then, Sarah, if you are quite in command of yourself once more” – his expression plainly said that he did not think it likely – “I have an invitation for you.”

Intrigued, she cocked her head. “And what might that be?”

His intent gaze eased from her face and set to roaming her apartment for several long seconds before he answered, as if he had only just noticed that the surroundings were different from the dorm room he had visited previously. “It falls to me to host the summer solstice masquerade this year – not my preference of seasons, but the usual hostess had other issues to attend to – and it would please me if you were to attend as my guest.” The mismatched eyes fastened back on her, and he swept her a fluid bow.

Sarah found herself smiling at his wording as much as the offer. Jareth had always struck her as a creature of autumn, all cool, dry words with an underlying promise of winter’s bite, and it secretly pleased her to have more evidence to that effect. “Masquerade? I’ve never heard of a summer masquerade before, though it sounds rather more fun than a ‘summer folly’ or ‘garden party,’ or whatever it is people used to do in this world when they noticed seasons’ passing with more than a page on a calendar.”

A liquid laugh, quick and fleeting. “It is a masquerade not because it is summer, but because it is my realm.”

“And may I have the same assurances as my last visit?” she asked, arching a slim brow even though her smile remained.

Jareth affected a put-upon air and acquiesced, “You may, certainly, although I think I would prefer to conduct you myself, this time, so as not to have a repeat performance with a contrary piece of jewelry…”

Sarah snorted a giggle. Her quick exit had not been a calculated withdrawal at the time so much as a half-panicked escape, but she was increasingly convinced that it had been the best decision to make. “That’s fine, as long as I have your oath that I still get to leave when I decide to.”

“You have it, lovely Sarah. I would not want to give you reason to deny me.”

“Then… I’ll come. Gladly,” she said. _As if there was any real question…_

“ _Excellent_. I shall find you at dusk on the day of the solstice, then.” The corner of his mouth turned up in what was not quite a smirk, an expression that Sarah had begun to interpret as approval.

Then she thought of something altogether too important to leave hanging until the appointed day.

“What on Earth – or not, as the case may be – should I wear? I’ll make a wild guess that my jeans aren’t quite dressy enough.” For a few moments Sarah thoroughly regretted the question, for the look on his face showed a veritable progression of ideas she was sure she wouldn’t approve of… but eventually he answered, to her mild surprise, without any of the obvious lewd choices.

Well, almost.

“That is not something you need concern yourself with. I will provide a suitable gown for the occasion, and you will shine like a jewel among river stones,” he said, the half-smile spreading back into a profoundly untrustworthy grin.

Sarah was skeptical. “Suitable and _appropriate_ , I hope? I mean, I’m no prude, but…”

He laughed, the sound slightly louder and somehow less… deliberate… than usual. “By the standards of my realm, you would be dressed _appropriately_ even if you came in naught but strands of gemstones and perhaps a bit of gauze. But I have some idea of what you mean by that, and because I am feeling _exceptionally_ generous, I will honor your preference.”

She let out the indignant breath she had drawn at his first sentence, and assented with a teasing smile of her own. “I am truly grateful for your generosity, then, Goblin King. I will see you in… two weeks, I think it is.”

He bowed again and stepped near enough to run a finger down her face, but to her immense disappointment, he stepped back across the border into his own world without kissing her, and before she could summon the nerve to pull him closer. Sarah swore she could hear the mocking echo of his laugh long after her heartbeat had slowed back to normal.

 

……

The fourteen days until the summer solstice passed in fits and starts for Sarah – there were times when she could do nothing but think of the upcoming celebration and hours dragged like days, but whenever her mind drifted elsewhere, they skittered past all but unmarked.

Finally, as the sun sank on the evening of the solstice, Sarah opened her window to the fragrant summer air and sat down to finish her waiting. While it seemed a bit silly to expect him to come through the window when he would be able to simply appear, this time, there was something fitting about the warm breeze that ruffled the curtains and stirred her hair as she sat on the couch.

She did not have long to wait, and she nearly laughed aloud to see that despite the practicality of sidestepping into the room, Jareth could not resist making the dramatic entrance that her open window allowed. Again as an owl, he soared through the window and went into a slowed dive, talons stretching downward as if to scoop up some rodent prey before they lengthened into legs and booted feet.

Unwilling to be complacent about how he would greet her this time, Sarah had braced herself for anything he would intend to use to surprise her, and was mildly disappointed when he simply grinned at her from where he stood.

“A most joyous solstice to you, Sarah. The night begins – and it looks like you are ready to go…?”

She nodded, rising and inclining her head in a slight echo of the embellished bows he was so fond of giving her. “Yes, I am.”

Her formality drew a chuckle from him, and he took up her hand to kiss her knuckles, eyes filled with mocking amusement. “Then let us waste no time, my fair mortal lady,” he said just above her skin, as the spinning sensation of travel flared.

It subsided much more quickly than she recalled from her previous sojourns, and deposited them into a small but well-appointed room with a dressing screen and a single tall mirror. Sarah looked around curiously, wondering where this hopefully-not-too-ridiculous garment she was to wear was, and Jareth gestured impatiently.

“Well, unless you’re waiting for me to whisk those strange human clothes of yours off by magic, go ahead and undress. The guests are waiting for us.”

Sarah froze, feeling her face go scarlet. _What the – he – he can’t be – oh, but I bet he IS serious…_

Jareth regarded her with a raised eyebrow for several seconds, before cracking a smile filled with pure deviltry. “No? What a pity.” He heaved a melodramatic sigh before shaking his head as if in resignation. “Ahh well. I’ve summoned one of my subjects – an acquaintance of yours, I believe – to help you dress. Though see that you don’t blush so prettily for her; I might be jealous.”

 _... …incorrigible jackass._ Sarah pressed her lips together and nodded, while shooting him her best death glare. He ignored the daggers shooting from her eyes and swept out of the room with a hearty chuckle, but a moment later Sarah’s good humor was at least mostly restored by the once again familiar-yet-different woman who entered in his stead.

Yerascatidryx the statue/sphinx/catwoman strode in wearing a daringly cut, chocolate brown dress over smooth, golden skin. She was barefoot, revealing toes that ended in sheathed claws rather than nails, and her eyes were slit-pupiled and feline yellow, but she otherwise looked as close to human as Sarah had ever seen her. Her lips twitched into an impish smile as she noted the human woman’s fading blush, and she tossed her head toward the door.

“Yon royal peacock asked me to help you out in the event that your clothes didn’t immediately fly off at his offer. Hope you don’t mind?”

“Ahh, no, not at all, and thank you. I’m sure I’ll need it; humans aren’t much for elaborate formal events anymore. Or humans without altogether too much money, anyway.”

Yera trilled a laugh and ducked behind the screen. “It’s good to see you, strange little mortal… or rather, I should be calling you Lady Sarah, I think, yes? You’ve been quite the traveler lately, and haven’t even lost your name or gotten cursed or made his Majesty angry; I’m quite impressed!”

Sarah wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but she settled for an anxious laugh. “I’m rather glad of that, myself…” Yera returned with an armful of vibrant green fabric and something silvery that sparkled in the light, her foot pushing a panel of the screen open to block the doorway as she moved.

“Here’s the gown he had made for you. Whatever else anyone might say about him, the king certainly has taste.” Sarah couldn’t make out enough of the fabric’s shape to comment, but whatever it was, it certainly looked luxurious.

When Yera had finally finished helping her into the clinging confection, Sarah looked in the mirror and found herself amply in agreement with the sphinx’s assessment.

The front of her torso was swathed – no, _painted_ – in a green that brought to mind moss and new oak leaves drenched by a summer shower, and at her hips the light, filmy material flowed into floor-length layers of fluttering panels that shifted and parted and floated around her as she moved. At the top of the bodice, the fabric twisted into branching points just below her collarbone, and the green tendrils flowed seamlessly into a loosely irregular, silver-gossamer mesh that clung closely to her skin. The mesh was strung here and there with tiny crystal beads, and it glistened across her shoulders and down both arms like dew-kissed spider web to end in crystal-tipped points on the backs of her hands. The back of the dress was made solely of the barely-there webbing, which held the bodice in place while leaving the skin of her back nearly bare. Under ordinary circumstances, Sarah would have been very nervous about such seemingly precarious construction, but whatever the webbing was made of – she wouldn’t have been surprised at all to find out it was real spider silk – was strong and flexible, a deceptively delicate net that cradled her body even as it adorned her. A belt of thicker strands of the stuff was similarly riddled with crystals to catch the light, and trailed long strands of them down to mingle with the fabric of the skirt.

As Sarah gaped at the dress, Yera deftly twisted her brunette locks into a coil and secured it with silver pins, leaving a few short strands at the nape to fall in tendrils upon the bare skin of Sarah’s neck. Finally, Yera handed her an elaborate half-mask of brown and green feathers, edged with a sheen of silver dust. Its shape and construction tugged at Sarah’s memory, and she looked up at the sphinx in surprise.

With a self-satisfied smile, Yera explained, “I had a bit of a hand in that – figured you’d like it given what you looked like last time I saw you.” Sarah paled at the implication, but Yera reassured her with a wink. “No, he didn’t ask where _exactly_ you were, and I didn’t see the need to tell him. I prowl enough mortal dreams that it was no great surprise I’d run into you.”

Letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, Sarah smiled gratefully. “Good, I didn’t exactly mean to be there. And I _do_ very much like the mask,” she added as she carefully hid the fasteners in her hair. “I guess I’m ready to go, then… Thank you so much for your help.”

A feline grin and another wink. “You’re quite welcome… it was my pleasure. Now, shall we go make a few dozen courtiers envy Jareth your company for the evening?”

Sarah started to nod, but hesitated. “Just a moment, first… I’m… rather nervous, to be honest. Do you have any advice on how not to embarrass myself? I’m not exactly used to events like this.”

Yera nodded slightly, her playful eyes sobering to a surprised respect. “You are wise to ask, but embarrassment is no danger that should worry you. Instead, I will advise you to remember some of the things that your books likely taught you about the fair folk, and remember them well: be cautious but do not seem it, be courteous to all you meet, and above all, show no fear.” Sarah suppressed a shiver that was born of equal parts excitement and nerves. “You are the personal guest of the King of this realm, and are therefore due great respect, mortal or no. Remember that as well, and demand that respect with every inch of your bearing.”

Wordless, Sarah made a deep curtsey in thanks, but the feline woman shook her head and pulled Sarah up. “As delightful as you look when you do that, better start playing the queen with me.” She gave her protégé a last, quick grin and motioned to the door. “After you, my lady.”

Sarah took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and stepped into the short hallway, where the music of revelry echoed toward her from outside.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a terrible person, and I'm terribly sorry. Every time I've worked on posting chapters here, it's taken me forever and I've run out of steam before finishing because I end up having to do quite a bit of reformatting.... and at some point I forgot I hadn't finished posting them, and stopped entirely.
> 
> BUT THIS STORY IS FINISHED. You can read the rest over on fanfiction.net - http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2543189/Dreamer-In-Silico
> 
> I might finish posting these chapters here at some point, but for now I want to just make sure anyone who gets into this gets pointed to where they can read the whole thing.


End file.
